1887170 - Moz-message-bar container is missing accessible name that prevents the static text to be announced

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: UI Widgets, defect, P2)

Description

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Attachment: VoiceOver is only announcing the link text and missing the static text before it.png

The moz-message-bar is marked up as a group (with role=alert) but the accessible name for the group is missing causing the screen reader users to miss the static text content when navigated to the controls within the group, i.e. by pressing Tab.

Note: VoiceOver would be able to navigate back to the static text to review it, but it's still not an expected behavior. Other screen readers may not be able to announce this because the message bar is included in the xul container.

Comment 1

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Attachment: VoiceOver announcing the static text as the group label when markup is corrected

We could add a unique id to the message container span and refer to it from the message content container with aria-labelledby and by adding to this container role=group.

Ideally, the role=alert container would get the label, but for the nested modules the ID reference won't be visible during the name calculation and it'll be ignored.

Comment 2

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Attachment: Bug 1887170 - Add a grouping and accessible name to the Moz-message-bar message container. r=#recomp-reviewers!,Jamie

The moz-message-bar is marked up as a group (with role=alert) but the accessible name for the group is missing causing the screen reader users to miss the static text content when navigated to the controls within the group, i.e. by pressing Tab.

By adding a grouping on the inner message container (that will be rendered within the same root) and refer to the message text as its accessible name, we'll ensure the grouping information (the static text which is the context for all the included controls) would be announced to screen reader users.

Comment 3

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

The severity field for this bug is set to S3. However, the accessibility severity is higher, .
:ayeddi, could you consider increasing the severity?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 4

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Attachment: Open Nightly every time you restart your computer message bar is announced fully with NVDA.png

Thank you all for the productive feedback and conversation in the patch!

I've tested a few moz-message-bars, with one of nimbus/heartbeat ones that I encountered on Windows recent Nightly with NVDA running, and all of them were announced when a focus is placed on a control within the bar - this has been changed with the bug 1894535 fix that added role=alert to the container.

For example: Choose what I share or Open Nightly every time you restart your computer message bars (attached) that I took a screenshot of with the NVDA output clearly reading all alert's content .

I've abandoned the revision and will close the bug as WFM.

If there would be any message bars discovered that are not fully reading their content for some reason, we could always re-open the bug or open a new one and return to the grouping and label approach as a fail-safe.