1646267 - Extraneous reporting of "list" by screen readers in Dev Tools autocompletes

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(DevTools :: Shared Components, defect)

Description

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

STR (with the NVDA screen reader):

1. Open the Dev Tools console.
2. Type just the letter "a".
   • Observe: NVDA says, "list, addEventListener..."
3. Press down arrow.
   • Expected: NVDA should say, "alert..."
   • Actual: NVDA says, "list, alert..."

"list" gets spoken every time you use the arrow keys to move through the items. This makes for a very inefficient, annoying experience for screen reader users.

The reason is that the list clone is rebuilt completely every time aria-activedescendant is set. Instead, the list clone should only be rebuilt when the main list changes.

This behaviour was introduced in bug 1285591, though that in turn was to fix a11y which got completely broken in bug 1266456.

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Attachment: Bug 1646267: In Dev Tools autocompletes, Only rebuild the list a11y clone when the main list changes.

Previously, the list clone was completely replaced every time aria-activedescendant was set.
This caused screen readers to extraneously report this as a new list every time the user cursored to a different item, even if the items hadn't changed.

Comment 2

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/0ab07b5b4a28
In Dev Tools autocompletes, Only rebuild the list a11y clone when the main list changes. r=nchevobbe

Comment 3

[Atila Butkovits]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0ab07b5b4a28

Comment 4

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Is this something we'd want to fix on ESR78? I guess we've already shipped a couple ESRs with this bug anyway, but the fix looks pretty small anyway.

Comment 5

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

I have no real data, but I imagine the majority of devs (the target audience for Dev Tools) would be using dev edition or at least release. I think we can let this one ride.