322814 - Firefox ignores the "AXPress" action

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Alexis Gallagher]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060108 Firefox/1.6a1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060108 Firefox/1.6a1

Firefox on OS X does not respond correctly to the "AXPress" action. This can be verified directly using the Accessibility Inspector from the Apple develop tools to inspect the close button of a Firefox window.

This is a failure of Firefox 1.5 to integrate itself with the OS X accessibility framework. It will break tools that depend on that framework in order to close Firefox windows. For instance, it breaks Witch preference pane app, which cannot close a firefox window.  It probably also breaks parts of the routine OS X accessibility support.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firefox and open a secondary window
2. Start the Apple Accessibility Inspector and inspect ("lock on") the window's close button
3. Try to close the window by performing the AXPress action.

Actual Results:  
The window does not close.

Expected Results:  
The window should close.

I have hosted a tiff image, which is a screenshot of the problem, at http://www.alexisgallagher.com/firefoxbug/screenshot.tiff

Comment 1

[Alexis Gallagher]

Attachment: screenshot of Apple Accessibility Inspector confirming the bug

Attaching this screenshot here instead of hosting it on my site.

Comment 2

[u63580]

Is bug 157209 at all related?

Comment 3

[Alexis Gallagher]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Is bug 157209 at all related?
> 

I am no expert, so I don't understand bug 157209 exactly.

However, I checked and Camino does not have this problem with AXPress. So that suggests that both bugs result from Firefox not supporting parts of the Apple accessibility api, support which comes for free with native widgets but which requires some work for custom widgets.

But I do not know if this bug is a consequence or subset of the same non-support described in 157209. If it is, they should be joined. If this is a separate issue, it should stand on its own.

Comment 4

[Håkan Waara]

This is working now on Firefox-trunk, if you build with --enable-accessibility (it's off by default).   Alexis, do you think you'll have a chance to verify?

Comment 5

[Håkan Waara]

All buttons support this now on trunk; this is definitely fixed.

To test it, you need to build from source with the flag --enable-accessibility.

Keep an eye out for a precompiled test build in the mozilla.dev.accessibility google group, in the near future!