1628891 - Thunderbird talks to much through status bar about new message activity

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[sm.everiss]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0 Waterfox/56.3

Steps to reproduce:

My issue is a multiple issue with nvda screen reader.
I did normal opperations, deleting, opening mail, filtering mail, and general management..

Actual results:

Well right now if I say have any messages well almost all of them with html content I get an alert saying the message may be junk, even when I know that its not.
Also I will get an alert when a message has remote content even though most of my mail is just fine.
The status bar in 68.7 recently released is right now outputting all its information on every user action.
So from downloading, sending, deleting, etc.
Its just far to much.
Before it didn't read and I got some progress from nvda screen reader for when things downloaded.
While this is a big improvement its to much being read.

Expected results:

Hmmm well maybe a way to either customise the information, put sounds for the information so I can group it more easily or simply not putting out all the information.
With the status bar, read/unread status of a message is probably fine but I don't need a continuous speel of every action I do or is being done all the time.
Similarly when I open a message with remote anything, I want a way to simply view pages say in a news letter, with headings as you would usually.
I don't want all the background alerts posted at my face.
Also google mail has a good spam filter, the tunderbird one seems to flag just about everything as bad meaning opening a message will slow it down some and will also put spurious information.
If I switch messags to say simple html, then all my headings and such go away.
It would be nice to get all this stuff sorted.

Comment 1

[sm.everiss]

As an additional to this it would be nice if there was a tleast a way for disabled people like myself to contact support or someone directly by email as some of these forums, etc can be hard to manage and navigate at times.

Comment 2

[Łukasz Golonka]

I am not a Thunderbird user, but judging from an issue opened against NVDA about this the following happens.
You've assigned role="status" to your status bar but this role has implicit aria-live="polite". To solve this it should be sufficient to do role="status" aria-live="off" for this control.

Comment 3

[Alex ARNAUD]

(In reply to Łukasz Golonka from comment #2)

I am not a Thunderbird user, but judging from an issue opened against NVDA about this the following happens.
You've assigned role="status" to your status bar but this role has implicit aria-live="polite". To solve this it should be sufficient to do role="status" aria-live="off" for this control.

Based on this https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/aria/ARIA22.html indeed, you're right. Thanks for pointing this to us.

@panglab, do you want to take this one?

Comment 4

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1628891-statusbar-aria-live-off.patch

I only applied the aria-live="off" to the main status bar. The other window's status bars aren't so talkative.

Comment 5

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

Comment on attachment 9139777 [details] [diff] [review]
1628891-statusbar-aria-live-off.patch

Review of attachment 9139777 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I tested this with my screen reader on Linux and the reader reacts only when I have the focus on that area.
I don't if we want to get a review from someone else on Windows with a screenreader.

Comment 6

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

I think this is a standard functionality and should work on Windows too. FX has this aria-live="off" to.

Comment 7

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Attachment: 1628891-statusbar-aria-live-off-ESR.patch

Comment 8

[Brian V]

Even when the Thunderbird window does not have active focus, the status bar has been disabled, and NVDA is on, NVDA is still reporting when messages are being downloaded, which was not occurring in the past.

I do not know whether the ARIA fix for the status bar is related to this, but wanted to note the behavior for developers.

Comment 9

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/1d0a8664ac22
Make main status bar less talkative for screen reader. r=aleca

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9139777 [details] [diff] [review]
1628891-statusbar-aria-live-off.patch

approved for beta

Comment 11

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 76.0b2:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/fd030f5b3632

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9139829 [details] [diff] [review]
1628891-statusbar-aria-live-off-ESR.patch

Good in beta, so approved for ESR

Comment 13

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 68.8.0:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-esr68/rev/d7829467b541