694266 - Change about window to be an accessible dialog and put all relevant static info into its acc description

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

The details box containing most of the text in the About window (e.g. "Nightly is designed by Mozilla, a global community working together to make the Internet better. ...") has an accessible role of unknown. It used to (and should) have a role of property page. This is a vbox with an id of "detailsBox".

Unfortunately, I'm not sure when this broke. It is correct in an old Firefox 5pre build I have here (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:5.0a2) Gecko/20110517 Firefox/5.0a2), but not in 10pre.

Comment 1

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Taking this.

Comment 2

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Attachment: Patch

This patch tricks accessibility APIs into thinking that this window is actually a dialog. Aside from the update stuff, it really is anyway. The relevant information the user wants to hear when initially entering the window is all shoved into the acc description of the dialog accessible itself, so different chunks no longer have to be discovered by tabbing around the dialog if the user just wants to hear the information.

Comment 3

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

(In reply to Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) from comment #2)
> Created attachment 566810 [details] [diff] [review] [diff] [details] [review]
> Patch
> 
> so different chunks no longer have to be discovered by tabbing
> around the dialog if the user just wants to hear the information.

Marco, about dialog contains some information like up-to-date status that is changed after you open the dialog or it contains different links. Is it still navigable content?

Comment 4

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

(In reply to alexander surkov from comment #3)
> Marco, about dialog contains some information like up-to-date status that is
> changed after you open the dialog or it contains different links. Is it
> still navigable content?

Yes, this patch just changes some ARIA magic around that has no impact on keyboard navigation.

Comment 5

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

Inbound: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound/rev/159a1ce7cabc

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/159a1ce7cabc

Comment 7

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Verified fixed in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0a1) Gecko/20111023 Firefox/10.0a1

Comment 8

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

I assume this change was Firefox specific, as it still exists in Thunderbird (tested with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:10.0a1) Gecko/20111024 Thunderbird/10.0a1). Is this assumption correct (in which case I'll file another bug against TB) or is something odd happening here?

Comment 9

[James Teh [:Jamie]]

I mean the bug still exists in Thunderbird; i.e. it isn't fixed. :)

Comment 10

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Yes, Thunderbird uses its own version of the dialog, so this is product specific.

Comment 11

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

You can just say "port the accessibility changes from bug 694266" to Thunderbird in that new bug.