1941630 - Firefox Menu button has vague accessible name of "Firefox"

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect, P3)

Description

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Attachment: Firefox button is the application menu control, as shown with Accessibility DevTools view of properties

Prerequisites:

1. Ensure a screen reader is running, i.e. NVDA on WinOS

STR:

1. In Firefox, locate and focus with keyboard the hamburger menu and observe the screen reader announcement
   1. you'd need to press Tab key until you get to the last group of toolbar controls, by default in release starting with "Save to Pocket" button, then press Right Arrow key to move the focus through the tools to the hamburger menu

Expected:

1. Menu button has a clear accessible name that concisely describes the functionality of this control, i.e. "Application menu" or "Firefox menu"

Actual:

1. Firefox is the label of the menu button. It has a description Open application menu that is often skipped and should not be relied on to provide an accessible name and communicate the functionality of the control

This is an access-S3 issue because it relies on assistive technology users to guess what this button would do. It really is close to access-S2 issue because at the moment the Firefox label is meaningless within the Firefox application.

Screen reader users in the recent user interviews (4 of 4) missed this button or did not really need what to expect in it, i.e.:

Firefox Button - application button. I do not know what it does, honestly.

Note that while users did find an alternative ways to the actions requested via the ribbon menu, not all functionality is provided in there and could only be accessed via the main menu or a direct URI "about:" which is not widely known by users

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️) (PTO June 8 - 12)]

The strings are here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/5b061cdc4d40d44988dc61aa941cfbd98e31791f/browser/locales/en-US/browser/appmenu.ftl#56,59

Tracing it back, it looks like this got introduced back in Firefox 4 when the menu button was on the left side of the tab strip and actually showed the label itself. What a trip through history!

Now that it's just an icon, updating these strings makes perfect sense. I've engaged the Content Design team to get an appropriate string selected.

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Looks like the content design ticket has some uncertainty about whether user confusion here is about the "Firefox" label or "application menu" label. But if I'm reading it right, the suggestion here would be to get rid of the "Firefox" part of the label. I'm a little uncertain as to whether this would mean we'd want to duplicate the tooltip to the label, or omit the label entirely. Anna, can you help here and/or on the JIRA ticket where you were tagged a while back (probably got lost) ?