1706966 - With native context menus enabled VoiceOver doesn’t read the context menu options on macOS 10.13.6

Status: NEW

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, defect, P3)

Description

[Emil Ghitta, QA [:emilghitta]]

Affected versions

• Firefox 90.0a1 (BuildId:20210421212740)
• Firefox 89.0b2 (BuildId:20210420191345)

Affected platforms

• macOS 10.13.6

Unaffected platforms

• macOS 10.12.6
• macOS 10.14.5
• macOS 10.15.7
• macOS 11.3

Preconditions

• Have the widget.macos.native-context-menus and the browser.proton.enabled prefs enabled.
• Enable VoiceOver.

Steps to reproduce

1. Launch Firefox.
2. Right click on any page, text link, image link, tab, bookmark, etc
3. Navigate through the available context menu options using the arrow keys.

Expected result

• VoiceOver reads all the available context menu options.

Actual result

• VoiceOver doesn’t read the available context menu options as in Bug 1703482.

Regression Range

• It seems that this is not a regression for the macOS native context menu. This issue is reproducible with builds from 2021-03-23 as well ( When the initial support for native context menus landed in Bug 1698997).

Additional Notes
Access the following link for screencast (Mozilla account needed).

Comment 1

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

Marking as P2 given 10.14 and 10.15 are unaffected

Comment 2

[Emil Ghitta, QA [:emilghitta]]

Leaving here for more visibility.

As mentioned here this seems to be reproducible with other browsers as well (Safari & Chrome).

Comment 3

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

I haven't had a chance to look into this yet, but given that it affects other browsers as well, my assumption is that it is unfixable.
As a workaround, users on these platforms who require VoiceOver in context menus could disable the pref widget.macos.native-context-menus manually.

Comment 4

[Romain Testard [:RT]]

It seems we have 3 options here (unsure how feasible/realistic they are though)

• Per comment 3 let users flip the pref though this is a very complex task to achieve
• Reach out to VoiceOver software makers and inform them about it so they can flip the pref themselves (I've seen AV softwares do similar things for cert management with the enterpriser roots feature)
• If we detect that a screen reader software connects to the A11Y API we do flip that pref ourselves.

In any case I'm lowering the priority since as raised above other browsers also have not found a better way, I'll leave this for the A11Y team to suggest the best next steps given their understanding of criticality and feasibility of options mentioned above. Given that only 10.13 is affected, perhaps worth looking into how many screen reader users are affected to make a call.

Comment 5

[Markus Stange [:mstange]]

Apple is the VoiceOver software maker - VoiceOver is the built-in screen reader on macOS. And 10.13 is unsupported by Apple as of December 2020.

Comment 6

[Julien Cristau [:jcristau]]

Could we maybe turn off widget.macos.native-context-menus on 10.13?

Comment 7

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Lowering severity as this version of macOS is unsupported.

Comment 8

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is set to S3. However, the accessibility severity is higher, [access-s2].
:spohl, could you consider increasing the severity?

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