GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 726166
Orca does not read title-attributes of abbr-tags
Last modified: 2018-02-08 13:04:24 UTC
Today I discovered a violation of the W3C spec concerning the abbr-tag by Orca. You can read the spec here: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/text-level-semantics.html#the-abbr-element "The abbr element represents an abbreviation or acronym, optionally with its expansion. The title attribute may be used to provide an expansion of the abbreviation. The attribute, if specified, must contain an expansion of the abbreviation, and nothing else." Steps to reproduce: 1. Download my prepared Gist: https://gist.github.com/Ryuno-Ki/9504127 (it's a minimal working example) 2. Open the html file in Firefox 3. Start Orca and set focus to the tab in Firefox Expected behaviour: Orca reads the following: "Just a showcase, for example a Minimal Working Example." Actual behaviour: "Just a showcase, e.g. a Minimal Working Example." I'm running Orca 3.10.2 on Sabayon Linux with Firefox 27.0. $ uname -a Linux stracciatella 3.13.0-sabayon #1 SMP Thu Feb 27 15:27:16 UTC 2014 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8600 @ 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
Oops, forgot the DE: $ mate-about --version MATE Desktop Environment 1.6.2
Thanks for the report. I do not see anything in that spec regarding what screen readers are expected to do in response; just what content creators are. Regardless.... While I do see your point regarding the expected behavior you describe, implementing it as described does have certain potentially-unexpected side effects for end users: 1. If you Up and Down Arrow and Orca presents the "e.g." as "for example" for the line, what should happen if you navigate by word or character? 2. If the braille reflects what is really on the screen, it wouldn't match the speech; if the braille matches the speech, cursor routing will be broken without associated changes because you cannot route the cursor to characters that are not there. 3. What if the user doesn't want abbreviations presented automatically? This might be because they want to see the same thing sighted users do. Or it might be because the content creator provided a big ol' title attribute for a well-known abbreviation. NASA ("The National Aeronautics and Space Administration") springs to mind. That's going to be a lot more chatty w.r.t. speech and occupy the bulk of the line on the braille display requiring panning that wouldn't otherwise be needed. This is a long way of saying, I 100% agree that Orca should make this abbreviation text available, and that at the moment Orca is failing to do so. But rather than just change it, let's figure out what the expected user experience is. I believe I've seen you post on the Orca list. Why not ask the users to chime in w.r.t. what they want and don't want under these circumstances?
Thanks for the reply, joanie! In fact, there is no WAI-ARIA recommendation. Neither is one planned. See http://www.w3.org/TR/aria-in-html/#rec (one would have to search the first column for "abbr", which is in an itemization (not in the sense of <ul>) of HTML-tags) and http://rawgithub.com/w3c/html-api-map/master/index.html#el-abbr (editor's draft!). But yeah, let's ask the users. I've opened a new thread on the mailing list: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2014-March/msg00078.html As stated there, in my mind was something to improve the speech flow like reading "e.g." as "for example" or "i.e." as "that is". But let's keep on on the mailing list and discuss technical aspects (like cursor routing) here. Do you agree with me?
Thanks for opening the thread. BTW, depending on the speech synthesizer and the user's customizable pronunciation dictionary, that speech flow might already be improved. To me the real bug here is that there is potentially useful information (i.e. for crazy acronyms no one knows) and Orca is not making that information available at all. Anyhoo, let's see what the verdict is. Thanks again!
So I've looked around how other screenreader deal with it. Well, it seems like NVDA has problems with abbr-tags as well: http://community.nvda-project.org/ticket/3828 And JAWS isn't able to handle it too, if I read this mail by Marco Zehe right: http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message?id=15397 So maybe we have a chance here to lead the development :-)