1902352 - A screen reader does not announce when a full page translation is completed

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Translations, defect)

Description

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

STR (with the NVDA screen reader):

1. Open a page that causes the translation panel to pop up; e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/
2. Select a language to translate and press "Translate" button to start the process.
3. Listen to what the screen reader reports for a few seconds.
   • Expected: The screen reader should report that the translation is completed.
   • Actual: The status of the translation is never reported.

Impact: A screen reader user has no idea that the translation is completed which would be especially confusing during first translations in this language pair when the language pack is being downloaded before an actual translation starts.

Currently the workaround is to start exploring the page, but this is still missing a status indication that a sighted user would get at the moment the text on their screen changes.

Possible solution is to use A11yUtils like it was implemented for the Select Translations panel for the bug 1894091.

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

Note that a fix for bug 1901175 would solve this somewhat if you opened the Translation panel from the toolbar button, but that still doesn't deal with the case where the Translations panel pops up by itself (in which case the toolbar button doesn't have focus and thus wouldn't ever be read).

Comment 2

[Greg Tatum [:gregtatum]]

The screen reader should report that the translation is completed

This is a little difficult to determine, as the idea of "complete" isn't as clear for a webpage. A webpage is a live document, and can change at any time, and translations will continue. The translation engine has a queue that it works through. I guess you could report when the queue is empty for the first time.

To further complicate matters, we've got Bug 1820252 in the backlog, which will only provide translations for things that are in the viewport as a performance optimization. This behavior is more obvious on large webpages like a large wikipedia article. In this case the translations will be generated on the fly, and the queue will be dynamically filled.

Comment 3

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

When does the tooltip text change from "translation in progress" to "translated from x to y" on the toolbar button? That seems like a reasonable proxy.

Comment 4

[Greg Tatum [:gregtatum]]

This is just when the engine is loaded and can start processing the queue. I can't remember if our recent change of having it on the first translation affects this as well, but we implemented it for Android, since the engine is loaded but still takes some time for the first translation. So the work here is to announce once the engine is ready, rather than translation is complete. We should prefer this time to be when the first translation result is received, as this indicates the engine is fully ready.

Comment 5

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

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

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