GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 659839
combobox selected items aren't announced
Last modified: 2012-03-19 12:03:45 UTC
When combobox selected item is changed then the change is not announced neither for expanded nor collapsed comboboxes. For expanded comboboxes Gecko fires focus event on selected item. There's no focus event for collapsed comboboxes. Comboboxes receive value change event which is used by Windows screen readers to announce selected item in case of collapsed combobx (i.e. for example follow the rule "announce value change event on focused object"). On the another hand selection change events should be emitted for combobox listbox what can be used to announce selected items as well. However selection change events are somehow broken in Gecko currently. I'm going to take care about that in nearest future so that I think Orca can rely on them too. It might be worth to know that autocompletes (like awesomebar autocomplete and HTML forms autocompletes) are announced correctly.
And the problem here is that due to Gtk+ we long ago made the decision to attend to focus: events in this case. Which was a bogus decision on our part. I'm in the process of sorting this out, so I'll take this one.
The other problem is that we are used to the combo boxes emitting events when collapsed rather than the child menus. Oh well. Hacked around in master. Hopefully with no side effects. People should test.
Hy Joanie, I tested now the fix, I not see any problems. Thank you very mutch the fix. I looked a form field combo box in bugzilla and looked some combo boxes in Thunderbird, bot two test Orca wonderful reads changed combo box items. Have similar problem with bugzilla list form fields? When the first item is focused, only changing the value when press two time the down arrow key. The typical example is the component list when you report a bug. Visual what happening if you trying changing this type form field? Attila
Created attachment 209987 [details] Debug file with shows a silent combo box in Thunderbird message filter dialog Hy Joanie, I found a silent combo box in Thunderbird message filters/new message filter rule dialog. If you fill other fields, you unable to choose what folder you would like put the filtered message, Orca doesn't announce the combobox value both speech, braille, and where am I operation. Attila
We are getting no events whatsoever out of that particular combo box. There is nothing I can do, no hacks I can perform, etc. I have filed a Mozilla bug for it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736983