503856 - Firebug statusbar panel button's accessible name empty in Minefield, but with content in Shiretoko

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

Description

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

I just noticed that Firebug's statusbar panel button's accessible name is different between Shiretoko and Minefield. In a current Shiretoko nightly, it is:

"Firebug 1.4X.0b8 Console: Off, Net: Off, Script: Off suspended In Browser"

In Minefield, it is empty. In both cases, the accDescription is:
"Description: Firebug 1.4X.0b8 Console: Off, Net: Off, Script: Off suspended In Browser".

To see the effect:
1. install the Firebug 1.4beta.
2. In Tools/Firebug/Options, check Accessibility Enhancements.
3. Restart the browser.
4. Shift+Tab from the Search Bookmarks and History bar twice to get to the Firebug button.

Expected: In both Shiretoko and Minefield, I'd expect NVDA or JAWS to say "Firebug 1.4X.0b8 Console: Off, Net: Off, Script: Off suspended In Browser  button".
Actual result: In Shiretoko this is the case. In Minefield, both just say "button".

The code where this button is defined is here:
http://code.google.com/p/fbug/source/browse/branches/firebug1.4/content/firebug/browserOverlay.xul#108

Comment 1

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

This problem was introduced in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090219 Minefield/3.2a1pre (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/shortlog/9db614caf1da
Most likely candidate is bug 455886.

Comment 2

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Requesting blocking since this needs to be fixed before Firefox 3.6 release. Alex, can you take a look sometime soon?

Comment 3

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

statusbarpanel is aria-labelled by its child "fbStatusText" xul:label which have neither @value nor text content as it is shown by DOMi. It would be nice to know how it is intendent to use.

Comment 4

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Hans, can you speak to the history of labelling this statusbar button for Firebug?

Comment 5

[Hans Hillen]

Attachment: Firebug 1.5 with Fixed accessible name for statusbar button

Comment 6

[Hans Hillen]

The Firebug Status icon works in the following way:

It's marked up as a button, which uses aria-labelledby and aria-describedby to get its accessible name and description.

aria-labelledby points a child element, that will contain an indication of the number of errors that have occurred.

aria-describedby points to he visible statusbar icon, which has descriptive text set in the form of a tooltiptext attribute. This description is an overview of all panels an their on/off status, as Marco described.

One issue is that the accessible name will be empty if no errors have occurred. In that situation there will only be an accessible description. For this reason I just committed a fix to the Firebug 1.5 branch, so that the button has a permanent label of 'Firebug Status', optionally followed by an error indication. The description has stayed the same. To try this modification out install the attached xpi file. You can generate an error by typing console.error() in Firebug's console panel. This will change the statusbar button'accessible name from "firebug status" to "firebug status 1 error".

However, this does not explain why Minefield doesn't announce the description anymore. It might have something to do with me relying on the tooltiptext attribute to be used as accessible descriptive text.

Comment 7

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Hans, thanks for fixing this in Firebug! However, I believe the problem runs deper than that. I just did some checking, and where we expose accessible names for other statusbar buttons such as WebVisum or the like in Firefox 3.5, we stop doing that for these other statusbar icons in Firefox 3.6b1pre and Firefox 3.7. I believe this has something to do with how we calculate the sub tree of the statusbar panels.
Firebug just happened to be the one where I noticed it first.

Comment 8

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

I took a look at the accessible tree we expose on Windows using accprobe.

The path of roles I see is: window - application - statusbar

status bar has children:
- push button (the "Done" in the lower left - doesn't seem pushable)
- tool tip (seems bogus)
- The "WebVisum" push button
- push button (seems bogus)

Comment 9

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Note, my comment #8 was with minefield, and only the webvisum addon installed.

Comment 10

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

I can see description of firebug button in DOMi. Also I tried an example which
should be equivalent to firebug's one.

<button aria-labelledby="label">
  <label id="label">Label1</label>
  <label>Label2</label>
</button>

here's button's name is "Label1".

Comment 11

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

do we have to fix anything here?

Comment 12

[JP Rosevear [:jpr]]

Status bar no longer exists in FF >= 4.  There may be a problem here still, but it needs to be restated in another way.  Also Firebug was fixed at the time.