624610 - application tab content updates should be reported to AT

Status: NEW

Description

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

When the content of application tab is changed then the tab gets blue colored. This notification should be propagated to AT so that for example screen readers are able to aloud this change. I suppose ARIA polite live regions are suitable for this.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

Why should app tabs be different from normal tabs here?

Comment 2

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Why should app tabs be different from normal tabs here?

Not sure I follow your question. But technically they are different: when page for not current app tab is updated then app tab is highlighted by blue color. It doesn't happen for normal tabs. All I'm saying we should expose that to screen readers.

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> But technically they are different: when page
> for not current app tab is updated then app tab is highlighted by blue color.
> It doesn't happen for normal tabs.

They are *visibly* different, as they don't display the page title. The same case is handled for normal tabs by simply displaying the updated title.

Comment 4

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

(In reply to comment #3)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > But technically they are different: when page
> > for not current app tab is updated then app tab is highlighted by blue color.
> > It doesn't happen for normal tabs.
> 
> They are *visibly* different, as they don't display the page title. The same
> case is handled for normal tabs by simply displaying the updated title.

Ok, I see, I didn't know that's because of title change. If we fire name change event for app tabs when title is changed like we do for normal tabs then perhaps we should do nothing here.

On the another hand highlighted app tabs is different than normal inactive tab with changed title because I always notice highlighted app tab but I may not ever know that inactive tab title was changed because title isn't shown entirely on inactive tab. So technically speaking highlighted app tab is not the same as inactive normal tab with changed title. Thus perhaps we should expose that in different way for AT.

Also app tab is kind of special tab, it's always visible and it should be important for user since it's permanent, so that if its title gets updated then probably it makes sense to notify screen reader users. This can be done on screen reader side or we could do that.

Personally I treat highlighted app tab as something happens and it needs my attention, for example, I've got new email or new tweet and etc.

Marco, what do you think about that:
1) Do AT users need to be notified when app tab title is changed?
2) If yes then should we take care about this or is it work for AT?

Comment 5

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

If we consider this as AT scope, we should still document it somewhere. I think I'd lean towards morphing this into a doc (best-practices) bug.

Comment 6

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

(In reply to comment #5)
> If we consider this as AT scope, we should still document it somewhere. I think
> I'd lean towards morphing this into a doc (best-practices) bug.

Fine with me if we left this for AT. Though leaving this for AT means AT should do specific stuffs to support Firefox UI (like if the tab has pinned state and name change event is handled, if we fire it at all, then aloud that tab was updated), I'm not sure this is right way.