1628396 - Tab close button not presented to assistive technologies

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1884970

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect, P3)

Description

[Colomban Wendling]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Steps to reproduce:

Check the presence of the active tab's close button in the AT-SPI2 accessible tree.

Actual results:

The tabs do not have any children, and a button with a relation to that tab can't seem to be found anywhere either.

Expected results:

The tab close button from the UI should be exposed to AT technologies (such as the screen reader) through AT-SPI2.

Interestingly, Thunderbird 68.6.0 does expose the close button on tabs that have one, but Firefox 68.6.0 doesn't -- neither does Nightlies of Firefox or Thunderbird.
However, on Thunderbird 68.6.0 while there is a button indeed, it's still not perfect because that button lacks a proper name or text (it has an empty label).

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

We did previously expose this. However, when this UI was refactored, the button was given a role of presentation on the grounds that AT users generally close tabs using the keyboard shortcut or the menu bar and this button can't be focused. See bug 1422934 comment 31. As well as the fact that this bug has been reported (suggesting it matters to the reporter), it's also worth noting that this might be useful for touch screen users, as well as screen readers where review commands are more commonly used; e.g. Mac VoiceOver. So, I think this is a valid request, but not high priority.

The fix here is to give this role="button" and a label (probably via aria-label).
This also needs to be reinstated into the a11y tree tests. See the stuff removed from accessible/tests/mochitest/tree/test_tabbrowser.xul in this commit.

Comment 2

[Colomban Wendling]

[…] AT users generally close tabs using the keyboard shortcut or the menu bar […]

This is generally true indeed; however as you mention there are other good reasons why reporting this element make sense.
For example, the use case that made me report this is what the "mouse review" feature of the Orca screen reader, which leads to speaking things under the mouse as it moves, which is of great help for people with limited vision but that still use the mouse (be it because of habit or whatnot).

Comment 3

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Updating the Accessibility Team's impact assessment to conform with the new triage guidelines. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Triage for descriptions of these whiteboard flags.

Comment 4

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Because this bug's Severity has not been changed from the default since it was filed, and it's Priority is P3 (Backlog,) indicating it has been triaged, the bug's Severity is being updated to S3 (normal.)

Comment 5

[Tim Williams]

Hello, I’m a new contributor and will submit a patch for this bug soon.

Comment 6

[Tim Williams]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1628396 - Tab close button not presented to assistive technologies

Comment 7

[Tim Williams]

are there any tests I should run for this patch?

Comment 8

[Tim Williams]

Attachment: Bug 1628396 - Tab close button not presented to assistive technologies. r?tgiles!

Comment 9

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to Tim Williams from comment #5)

Hello, I’m a new contributor and will submit a patch for this bug soon.

Turns out this is a duplicate issue and already being fixed in bug 1884970. Sorry about that!

Comment 10

[Tim Williams]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #9)

(In reply to Tim Williams from comment #5)

Hello, I’m a new contributor and will submit a patch for this bug soon.

Turns out this is a duplicate issue and already being fixed in bug 1884970. Sorry about that!

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1884970 ***

:dao Understood, no worries.

:tgiles I am a new contributor and would be keen to work on more bugs or projects if you have any that could use the help. Thanks!

Comment 11

[Tim Giles [:tgiles]]

Hi Tim, I just left some advice on next steps for the other bug you are working on (Bug 1804166). Let's see if we can get that across the finish line first.