Starting with Thunderbird 89.0 Beta 1, notifications for incoming emails are no longer recognized by the screen reader. With version 88, all incoming emails were still recognized and read by the screen reader.

Steps to reproduce

1. StartJAWS or any other screen reader that you have available.
2. Make sure Thunderbird is minimized in the system tray.
3. Wait for a new email to arrive.

Result

The screen reader does not speak the notification. Unfortunately, I don't know if a visual notification is displayed or if there is a defect there as well.

Expected

The screen reader should read the notifications as soon as an email arrives, as in previous versions.

My research showed that a notification is spoken, but only when there are more than one or two unread emails. It seems very irregular to me. Haven't figured out exactly when it is read and when it is not.

Just now I have to observe that all notifications on my home computer are spoken by my screen reader. Unfortunately, I don't know why or what the difference is. Apparently I need to observe it longer.

Now that Thunderbird has been running longer, the notifications on my home computer for incoming emails are no longer spoken by my screen reader. From this I can conclude the following:

• If Thunderbird is loaded after the computer is rebooted, the notifications for new emails work as usual for screen readers.
• After a while, the notifications for screen readers work very unreliably. Sometimes not until the second or third email arrives, if they have not been read before.

This issue persists with Thunderbird 90 B1.

I wonder if what you're describing isn't just that we've changed how the notifications work so that old items aren't notified about (only notify about the same email once). Maybe in the past you got the old items too...
Either that, or maybe a bug in Jaws. It seems odd that leaving it running for a while makes it unreliable.

Unfortunately, I can't say what the reason is. But I am pretty sure that it is not old messages, but new incoming messages. This problem can be reproduced with NVDA as well as with JAWS.

With the update to Thunderbird 94, email notifications for screen readers now don't work at all.

Ali Savas: do you know if you were using Microsoft Windows desktop notifications in version 88? Don't worry if you don't remember, it would just help confirm whether this was triggered by the change in bug 715799.

We'll see if my small patch for bug 1735048 fixes this as well, but I have a feeling to properly address this bug we will have to re-write the window to make its content accessible. I'll assign this to myself for now.

Hi Henry,

I never turned on the Microsoft Windows desktop notifications in Thunderbird. Thunderbird's notifications worked fine up to version 94 without turning on these notifications from Windows. The notification type is the SAME when you select an email that is detected as junk.

Sorry, of course I meant from version 89.

ok, thank you.

Do notifications work as expected in version 102?

(In reply to Alessandro Castellani [:aleca] from comment #13)

Do notifications work as expected in version 102?

Yes, it's working now.