1834354 - Voice Over on Mac OS does not say anything when navigating with arrow keys and caret browsing enabled

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

Description

[miki123211]

Voice Over on Mac OS does not say anything when navigating with arrow keys with caret browsing enabled. This makes it impossible to navigate websites line-by-line, which is helpful when reading long-form text like newspaper articles and absolutely essential when reading code snippets. It is possible to use the VO + left arrow and VO + right arrow keyboard shortcuts to read by paragraph (or something like it), but this is far from ideal. For example, when reading Wikipedia articles, Vo + left/right stops at all links, which Wikipedia has plenty of, making reading unpleasant. When reading other kinds of articles and blog posts, the paragraphs are often overly long. This causes problems when we want our screen reader to repeat a small part of the text that we didn't fully understand, as it requires us to read that whole paragraph once again, and it can potentially be several sentences long. However, this method of reading is the most problematic with code, as some pages split code so that one syntax highlighted token is one navigable element, while others split it in other ways which are just as difficult to comprehend when navigating by line is not possible. The Voice Over shortcuts to read by line (VO + up / down) don't work either. For just one example of a page where such problems can be observed, please see http://d2l.ai/chapter_linear-regression/oo-design.html That page mostly splits code by line, but some lines are split further for no understandable reason.

Apple's WebKit is the only engine so far that gets this right. WHile it doesn't have a dedicated caret browsing mode, navigating with the arrow keys when VO is enabled (mostly) works and gives the desired results.

Comment 1

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

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:Jamie, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.