1804866 - The Months and Years spinners from Datepickers are not being read by NVDA on Hover

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Found in

• 109.0a1 (2022-12-09)

Affected versions

• Firefox Nightly 109.0a1 (2022-12-09)

Affected platforms

• Windows

Preconditions

• Enable NVDA.

Steps to reproduce

1. Reach url: data:text/html,<input type='datetime-local'>
2. Open the Calendar.
3. Click the Month/Year button from the calendar.
4. Hover the mouse cursor over any other month or year from the spinners.

Expected result

• The previous or next months displayed in the Month spinner should be read out loud by the NVDA on Hover.
• Other Years from the Years spinner should also be read out loud on Hover by the NVDA.

Actual result

• The Months and Years from the Spinners are not read out loud by the NVDA when we mouse hover them.

Regression range
I will try to get a manual regression for this issue later on since builds started with the mozregression tool are not being read by NVDA.
However I think this issue has been caused by the recent implementations to Datepickers.

Comment 1

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

(In reply to Rares Doghi from comment #0)

The previous or next months displayed in the Month spinner should be read out loud by the NVDA on Hover.

This an NVDA bug that we cannot fix on our/Fx end and we are expected to use aria-label vs off-screen text workaround. This is a known mouse tracking bug in NVDA that we can't solve on our end. It occurs because NVDA mouse tracking prefers to use the text interface if present so it can read by line, word, etc. That code doesn't know that aria-label should override for buttons, while for mouse tracking, only visible information is expected by NVDA to be announced. It works for chrome buttons because those don't expose the text interface.

For the bug 1804267, we run few quick tests with other browsers on Windows and the behavior is the same - no image buttons from the content page are announced by NVDA.

Other Years from the Years spinner should also be read out loud on Hover by the NVDA.

This was done intentionally with aria-hidden=true on non-selected months and years within spinners to prevent them from being read with read-all mode by screen readers, per the ARIA Spinbutton design pattern example:

For assistive technology users, hides the text showing the next and previous values that is displayed adjacent to the up and down arrow icons since it would otherwise add superfluous elements to the screen reader reading order that are likely to be more confusing than helpful.

That's being said, I am not sure if we need to read it out on hover: on one hand, this would serve users with cognitive difficulties, dyslexia, low vision who rely on a screen reader to read the content, but on another hand, the implementation would likely allow all these previous and next options to be read by a screen reader and would drastically increase a verbosity of the component.

Comment 2

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Closing per the comment above.

We cannot fix the NVDA issue, but if the hover over spinbuttons would be reported by a user, we can always reopen the ticket. At the moment, it is also consistent with the native platform's spin buttons behavior