1885011 - Live region with aria-atomic="true" not announced by screen reader

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

Description

[Patrick H. Lauke]

Attachment: live-region-test.html

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

With a screen reader running:

1. Open attached test page (a basic button that, when triggered, updates a live region container's content)
2. Trigger the button

Actual results:

Using JAWS 2024 and Narrator, the live region is not announced. Only the combination of Firefox/NVDA triggers the announcement.

Expected results:

JAWS 2024 and Narrator should announce the live region update, same as NVDA

Comment 1

[Patrick H. Lauke]

Removing the aria-atomic="true" from the live region makes it work in JAWS 2024 as well.

The same test file works fine with the aria-atomic in Chrome/JAWS, Chrome/NVDA, Chrome/Narrator, so this seems a Firefox issue rather than a JAWS issue.

Comment 2

[Patrick H. Lauke]

(Seems live regions don't work in general with Firefox/Narrator, with or without aria-atomic, so that is likely a different problem...)

Comment 3

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

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Disability Access APIs' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 4

[James Teh [:Jamie] (away returning 12 Jan)]

(In reply to Patrick H. Lauke from comment #1)

The same test file works fine with the aria-atomic in Chrome/JAWS, Chrome/NVDA, Chrome/Narrator, so this seems a Firefox issue rather than a JAWS issue.

I'm afraid that's not a given. Unlike NVDA, JAWS uses entirely different code for Chrome and Firefox and the latter isn't as well maintained, so it's entirely possible for both browsers to yield different results, even though they expose largely the same API. Regardless, I'll need to work with Vispero to figure out what's going on here.

Comment 5

[James Teh [:Jamie] (away returning 12 Jan)]

(In reply to Patrick H. Lauke from comment #2)

(Seems live regions don't work in general with Firefox/Narrator, with or without aria-atomic, so that is likely a different problem...)

Correct. Firefox doesn't (currently) have a native UI Automation implementation, so UIA falls back to the IA2 -> UIA proxy, which is... buggy at best and completely unmaintained by Microsoft as far as I know. Native UIA is covered by bug 762769, but that is a pretty large project.