345861 - Feed Subscription icon in address field is not accessible

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Wayne DeAngelo]

Test environment: Bon Echo nightly build 20070724
Test done on IBM T42 ThinkPad.

Description:  
When a page containing an RSS feed subscription is displayed, Firefox shows an orange "Subscribe to this page" icon in the address/location field at the top of the window.  This icon is not accessible from the keyboard, and its existence is not announced by a screen reader.

Note: This is an accessibility defect, since information is provided to a sighted user via the Firefox user interface in a manner not presented to a blind user.  It is not a section 508 defect, since a workaround (though much less usable) is provided via the bookmarks menu pulldown.

Steps to Reproduce:
1. View this web site: http://www.cnet.com
2. Note the orange "subscribe to this page" icon at the end of the address/location field.
3. Try to navigate to that icon with the keyboard, or use a screen reader to announce the contents of the address/location field.  

Expected Result:
If information is made available visually in the application's user interface, there should be a way to navigate to the information using the keyboard or listen to it with a screen reader.

Comment 1

[Mark Pilgrim (inactive)]

ATs can determine whether there are feeds on the page the same way that Firefox does -- by looking for <link rel="alternate"> links in the DOM.

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

It's the same as Bookmarks->Subscribe to this page, which is grayed out when there is no feed.

Also, the feed icon is available in the MSAA tree as a child of the location bar.

We should contact the AT vendors and tell them how to get this info so they can announce it in their page summaries on new page load.

Comment 3

[Wayne DeAngelo]

Reopening bug as per Aaron response, "There's either a bug in Firefox or in the screen readers. Which is it? We drive both."

Comment 4

[Mark Pilgrim (inactive)]

I contacted GW Micro about this, and they responded:

"""
Mark,

Yes, this is a very cool feature. In IE, you can make a sound event 
trigger so that the user knows RSS feeds are available whenever they 
hear whatever sound they assign. They then know they can use the RSS 
feed key in IE (ALT-J, maybe?) to access the feeds on that page. So I 
think we're certainly interested in supporting that in Firefox as well.
"""

Comment 5

[Aaron Leventhal]

Yes, Alt+J accesses the icon in IE.

This may be as simple as adding accesskey="J" (well, use the DTD abstraction for accesskey assignment).

We don't have sound events in Firefox however -- and unless we get them, this will have to be something that the screen reader figures out by looking at the location bar children. No real convenient way to do that now.

But, I think we should keep this bug for the accesskey Alt+J.