Help with a bug report

[Jason White]

Dear Chromium accessibility community,

I submitted a bug report concerning intermittent, accessibility-related
crashes (segmentation faults) of Chromium, running with Orca under
Linux/GNOME. I have included gdb backtraces as attachments to the bug
report, and updated it with details of subsequent crashes.

Unfortunately, initial responses to the bug report came from someone who
did not appear to be an accessibility specialist and who did not seem to
appreciate the significance of the symbolic debugging output that was
attached. The report was marked as "untriaged". There haven't been any
replies since then.

Now to the question: as a bug reporter, what additional steps should I
be taking to make it more likely for the bug to be appropriately
prioritized and considered by an accessibility expert involved in the
project? What should I do next time to make the process work more
effectively, so that at least the report is classified as genuine and
lands somewhere on the priority list?

The bug report for reference:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1422989

With thanks and regards,

Jason.

[Dirk Pranke]

Hi Jason,

Thanks for raising this issue. From looking over your bug, it does look like it was filed correctly and some of the right people have been cc'ed on the bug, but I'm guessing it slipped through the cracks. Unfortunately, even on a project as big as Chromium, we don't have infinite resources and some areas are short of staffing. This is one of them. Even so, I'll see if I can get someone to look at this.

To answer one of your questions, we often used "untriaged" to mean that the engineering team responsible for the area hasn't confirmed the bug to their satisfaction yet. It isn't meant to imply that you haven't done any triaging -- we certainly appreciate what you have done -- it's just the result of trying to manage complex processes without creating an insanely complex tool.

Lastly, just as a note, we don't usually encourage people to send bug reports to the mailing lists (if we did, they would overwhelm the lists). Usually the reason we haven't responded to a bug is just due to a staffing shortage, and more poking isn't going to fix that :). However, I'm okay with you doing it in this case because it is a fairly specialized niche and your escalation  is helpful.

-- Dirk

[Jason White]

Thank you - it is now being worked on, and I’ll follow any advice you offer in submitting future reports. My priority is to provide the appropriate information to make the work of project developers as easy as I can. This includes following best practices.