2051182 - New sidebar: Panel selectors have confusing accessibility behaviour

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Sidebar, defect, P2)

Description

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

STR (with the NVDA screen reader):

1. Ensure the new sidebar is enabled.
2. Press control+h to open the history sidebar panel.
3. Shift+tab thrice to reach the panel selectors.
   • Expected: NVDA should say: "tab control, History tab selected 3 of 4"
   • Actual: NVDA says: "tab control, Open bookmarks (Ctrl+B) toggle button not pressed"

There are several problems here:

1. The container has role="tablist", which makes sense. However, the items have a role button, which doesn't make sense inside a tablist. They should be role="tab" with aria-selected instead of aria-pressed.
2. Because of the incorrect role, position information (1 of 4) isn't reported. That makes it less clear to a user that they're in a group they can navigate with arrow keys.
3. Bookmarks (the last item) always gets focus when you first focus the selectors. Ideally, it should be the selected panel.
4. The labels for History and Bookmarks include "Close" or "Open". This is a bit confusing for a tablist style pattern, though I do understand that it's a bit different to a normal tablist in that clicking it while it's open will close the panel. Interestingly, "Tabs from other devices" doesn't have this Open/Close prefix.

Access s3 because this is pretty confusing, but it can be worked around and the user will eventually figure it out.

Comment 1

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

I prototyped a fix for this using Claude. It works, but I haven't dug into whether the code is remotely feasible yet. For reference, it's in my wip/sidebar branch.