254995 - Caret Browsing and other alert dialogs should have AccessibleRole "ALERT"

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

Description

[Peter Korn]

1. Launch Gnopernicus
2. Launch Mozilla with accessibility support
3. Press F7 to turn on caret browsing mode (and to bring up the Caret Browsing
dialog)
4. Note that Gnopernicus fails to automatically read this dialog
5. Launch at-poke, and explore the dialog.  Note it has role "frame" instead of
role "ALERT", which is the convention for simply dialogs that should
automatically be read by screen readers

Comment 1

[Aaron Leventhal]

Peter, should any popup dialog have that role? For example, shouldn't the Find
dialog be automatically read? I realize it's not really an alert though.

I think Gnopernicus should just automatically read anything with
ATK_ROLE_DIALOG. Why wouldn't a user want a popup dialog automatically read?

Comment 2

[Peter Korn]

Aaron, we struggled with this - good algorythms in Gnopernicus to read the right
things from windows/dialogs/alerts.  Turns out it's fairly hard to get right in
a general way.  We decided that for Gnopernicus 1.0 we would user role ALERT -
which is a dialog that lacks lots of controls a user might interact with - and
work on the more general problem when we had a scripting environment in our toolbox.

Comment 3

[Aaron Leventhal]

Just curious. What's wrong with automaticaly reading all text and alternative
text up until the first control, and then reading the focus? I think that's how
Windows screen readers work -- it would be too expensive to deal with stuff on a
per-dialog basis, even though scripts and configuration files allow it.

Comment 4

[Aaron Leventhal]

Peter & Bill say that a more general fix is coming, but this should be fixed
eventually anyway since it's a good hint and follows the ATK spec.

Comment 5

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

Marco, could you look at this bug please?

Comment 6

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

This is closed WFM since we are exposing the dialog text as a description now which gets picked up by screen readers as dialog text automatically. Note that Gnopernicus is no longer in existence, but Orca should be picking this up fine. NVDA does.

Comment 7

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Verified in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0