After bug 396166 landed, the status bar live region, made out of XUL labels, suddenly started speaking again with NVDA. However the text spoken is disjointed and fragmented. It sounds like "tr" "nsfer" "ata" etc., as if the text isn't being pushed in at once or retrieval somehow fails. This was reported on Twitter by a user and confirmed by me.

Jamie, it'd be great if you figure out what's wrong with our implementation.

I would argue that the status bar should not be a live region at all, or only be perhaps while the document is busy. Right now an AT is instructed to announce changes to the status bar at all times, including when moving the focus between links (the URL changes on the status bar). The fact that this info is coming to NVDA disjointed is in my opinion not really the major issue here. The status bar currently has live:polite. This is either there specifically, or is getting it because the role is status perhaps? Either way, this never happened in the past, and while it exists it makes Firefox extremely unusable with NVDA. I would strongly argue that this is a bad use of live regions, thus I don't think it should be up to the AT to filter this. Unless there is already another bug specifically for this, I would suggest renaming the summary to reflect the more pressing issue.

Marco, what about Michael suggestion to remove live regions from firefox status bar?

Just for further background: (In reply to Michael Curran from comment #2) > The status bar currently has live:polite. This is either there specifically, > or is getting it because the role is status perhaps? role="status" implies aria-live="polite". It should be possible to override this with aria-live="off". > Either way, this never happened in the past, That's because of bug 396166, which meant that the status bar didn't have accessible text, even though it was a live region.

(In reply to alexander :surkov from comment #3) > Marco, what about Michael suggestion to remove live regions from firefox > status bar? Then things would go back to the way things were before bug the text became AccessibleText: NVDA would simply not speak the updates from the status bar. Compared with the distracting babbling that happens now, that would be more than acceptable, at least it wouldn't appear that we regressed.

Dao, can you take a look please? (status bar shouldn't be a live region, see comment #4)

(In reply to James Teh [:Jamie] from comment #4) > role="status" implies aria-live="polite". It should be possible to override > this with aria-live="off". The label is here: http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/annotate/a73a2b5c423b/browser/base/content/tabbrowser.xml#l4487 If someone wants to provide a patch, I can review it.

Marco, would you willing to fix this one?

Taking.

Keep the role "status" so the semantics are unchanged in case assistive technologies rely on it, just change the aria-live politeness to off.

(In reply to Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) from comment #10) > Keep the role "status" so the semantics are unchanged in case assistive > technologies rely on it Not only this, but the status bar role is semantically correct here; i.e. it shouldn't be changed even if AT don't rely on it. :)

A try build with this change is here, and I've verified with it that the patch works as intended: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/try-builds/mzehe@mozilla.com-4b349aa59978

Jamie, can you verify that this now works as expected in NVDA, including that you still get the status bar exposed as expected? Thanks!

(In reply to Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) from comment #15) > Jamie, can you verify that this now works as expected in NVDA, including > that you still get the status bar exposed as expected? Thanks! Verified working nicely in 22.0a1 (2013-03-25).