[FYI] Chrome/Chrome OS Accessibility Version 83 Release Notes

[Kara Booker]

Hi everyone,

Before we dive into product updates, we wanted to take a moment to recognize that this is an incredibly challenging time for many right now.  We hope that you are staying safe and as well as possible during this time.

Chrome version 83 comes with a number of accessibility fixes and improvements across platforms. Here are some of the notable updates in this milestone, with links to relevant bugs and code changes when available for reference. 

Chrome updates across all platforms

• ARIA Annotations support is now available without the use of a flag. It’s currently implemented by Orca. There is no content yet available that takes advantage of this new markup. But in the future, ARIA Annotations will provide better access to comments across the web, features like footnotes and suggestions in Google Docs, and any types of additional information that web authors want to tie to a particular element on the page (Bug 1006767)

• HTML <table> elements that use display:flex or display:block are now exposed as tables to assistive technologies. (Bug 1041290, Bug 1011067)

• Screen reader users are now able to use the "Read Current Line" and "Read Current Word" commands to read the placeholder text in a text field (Change 2125450)

• Date time picker keyboard and screen reader accessibility improvements. (Bug 1026544, Bug 1022920)

• Improved keyboard selection behavior of the month field in date fields. (Bug 1047439)

• Improved the date/time picker icon focus ring. (Bug 1053326)

• ARIA labels were fixed to preserve the author specified order for descriptions. (Bug 1047988)

• Improved finding accessible nodes under the mouse cursor. (Bug 1048959, Change 2051870)

• Added an accessible title to the permission prompt bubble. (Bug 434574, Change 2116926)

• Added improvements to handling of device scale factor and hit testing. (Bug 1007488, Change 2117330)

• Fixed to allow the “restore pages” dialog to receive keyboard and screen reader focus. (Bug 1042010, Change 2055624)

Chrome on Desktop Platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux)

• Improved screen reader navigation of the chrome://accessibility page. (Bug 877714, Bug 785493)

• Devtools

• Added DevTools support for Color Vision Deficiency simulation. (Bug 1003700, Official Documentation)

• Fixed Grid accessibility name. (Bug 963183)

• Made dialog SR accessible. (Change 2005508)

• Made color swatch, which lives color-picker, keyboard and screen-reader accessible. (Change 1931727)

• Set focus when clicking on “Clear site data” button to make the page more accessible. (Change 2002083)

• Improved keyboard navigation for the accessibility tree in Elements pane. (Change 2101371)

• Added labels to the navigation control bar on the screencast tool. (Change 2120282)

• WebUI Tab Strip: Made group headers more keyboard accessible. (Bug 1027373)

• Fixed issue where all the contents of the contenteditable appeared to be on a single line. (Bug 1059612)

• Fixed position and size calculations for items nested in a list. (Bug 1047025)

• Made the close button in the Chrome restore window keyboard-focusable (Change 2047454)

• Improved accessibility of safety check UI. (Bug 1015841)

• Text level elements are now included in recursive name computation. (Bug 1053507)

• Screen reader correctly announces "blank", instead of text on prior line when inserting a line break. (Bug 1044410)

• Fixed an issue with screen readers announcing expanded buttons in Google search as collapsed incorrectly. (Bug 1059394)

Chrome on Mac

• Fixed an issue where VoiceOver sometimes read the text of a link in the wrong order. (Bug 1048782)

• ARIA trees are now exposed as tables, making them navigable with VoiceOver. (Bug 868480)

• Fixed crashes when navigating table headers with VoiceOver. (Bug 1052334)

• Improved custom focus ring visibility. (Bug 1051391)

Chrome on Windows

• Fixed issue where screen reader buffer goes blank when visiting interstitial page. (Bug 1058959)

• Fixed issue where screen reader announced “blank” when trying to read PDF documents (Bug 1047856)

• Fixed issues where screen readers announce “blank”. (Bug 1057671, Bug 1057831)

• Fixed a regression in the omnibox which caused typed text to not be announced by screen readers when a user arrowed over it. (Bug 1047906)

• Fixed an issue with Narrator and contenteditable that would incorrectly report fields as read-only. (Bug 1041305)

• Fixed issues with tables and the style="display: flex" attribute. (Bug 1041290, Bug 1011067)

• Fixed for incorrect focus handling after minimizing and refocusing. (Bug 1048195)

• Hit testing crash fix (Bug 1061323)

• Fixed an issue with Narrator when moving focus from between iFrames and browser UI. (Bug 1064339)

Chrome OS

• ChromeVox

• Added Smart sticky mode. ChromeVox will now automatically turn off sticky mode when you're on a text field. Just navigate to the text field and start typing. Note that Search E and Search Shift E (E and Shift E with sticky mode on) are excluded to facilitate fast navigation (Change 2116777)

• Made usability enhancements to the ChromeVox menus. (Bug 1049396, Bug 1020003)

• Added an option to show/hide braille commands in the ChromeVox menus. (Bug 1049363)

• Announce when the user executes a command when no focus is set. This helps the user better understand what actions they can take from there. (Bug 981964)

• Made pauses in speech proportional to the speech rate; a faster speech rate makes the pauses shorter, while a slower speech rate makes the pauses longer. (Bug 1050833)

• No longer summarize repeated characters of two or less. For example, when reading C++, ChromeVox used to speak “C two plus signs”. Now, ChromeVox reads “C plus plus” and exhibits similar behavior when encountering other symbols. (Bug 1051951)

• Improved navigation with collapse / expand states. (Bug 1047538)

• Improved the experience in Learn Mode output by no longer queuing speech. (Bug 1052860)

• Fixed the speak text under mouse feature, which had stopped working (Bug 1047069)

• Fixed issue where braille would not correctly clear when moving to an empty line in a text area. (Change 2085155)

• Fixed issue where Chromevox didn’t read content of a text area inside of a nested iframe. (Bug 1038739)

• Added feature which plays the ‘progress click’ earcon until the text to speech engine has fully loaded upon startup. This is done to communicate that ChromeVox is loading. (Bug 1046430)

• Fixed issue where the user was unable to linearly navigate backwards to get out of multi-line edit boxes. (Bug 1024950)

• Improved touch interaction: added new earcons and stop speech when leaving an item. (Change 2088510)

• More accurately report window title changes. (Bug 1058613)

• Added an option in the ChromeVox options page to announce numbers as digits or as words. (Change 2003895)

• Improved color contrast of disabled items in the Chromevox menu to be more visible. (Change 2111076)

• Implemented some pass-through mode improvements. (Change 2104449)

• Added custom ChromeVox announcements for all settings pages in the system tray in efforts to make them more intuitive. (Bug 1009714)

• Made the "Invalid password" error shown in the parent password field when installing extensions accessible to ChromeVox. (Bug 1062074)

• Android Apps on Chromebooks (ARC++)

• Made an improvement so that when focus is lost, we now reassign the focus to the root node of the deleted element’s tree. (Bug 1033307)

• Made ChromeVox focus interaction improvements. (Change 2104743)

• Landed a fix to prevent the window title being announced twice. (Change 2099671)

• Out-of-box-experience: 

• Show docked magnifier as an option on the accessibility page. (Bug 867474)

• Added accessibility setting for showing shelf navigation buttons when in tablet mode. (Bug 1050544)

• Improved the accessibility of smart card pin entry. (Bug 1043194, Change 2074441, Change 2066910)

• Fixed the files app toolbar tab order to better match visual order. (Change 2089192)

Chrome on Android

• In-line HTML <time> elements are now announced as separate nodes. (Bug 1043377)

• Dialogs/alerts now announce their title during traversal under some conditions. (Bug 1048694)

• Landed accessibility performance improvements on large/complex pages. (Change 2080857, Change 2067443)

• Nested structures inside HTML <a> elements (links) are now traversable in all TalkBack granularity modes. (Bug 1018555)

• Enabled tab group features for TalkBack. (Bug 92134)

• Clipped elements (using CSS overflow: hidden), are no longer exposed as scrollable, so that voice control will no longer treat them as interactive.

• Updated accessibility label of media player total time text (Bug 971453)

• Added better photo picker video control labels. (Change 2080368)

Chrome on iOS

• Disabled voice search while VoiceOver is enabled. (Bug 998524)

• Improved behavior when navigating the bottom drawer with VoiceOver. (Change 2044090)

--

Kara Booker |

Google |

Chrome & Chrome OS Accessibility Program Manager

[Chime Hart]

Well, thanks Kara-and-all for all these changes. I may be in a minority,
because I read all my mail in Alpine, a Linux client, but also, LYNX, a
web browser which seemingly will `never have javascript support. Why do I
mention this? I was especially interested in 2 of your changes, the read
current line, as well as seemingly ajusting numbers to single digits.
However, when I click those links, I get this criptic 1line message
To use PolyGerrit, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings, and
then refresh this page.
Many google pages now have this 11link toolbar which won't let you do much
without javascript.
And lastly, can any1 please inform, when will we have a real "flat review"
mode, as almost all other screen-readers have? Thanks so much in advance
Chime

[A.M.H.]

Hi.
Okay, according to the changelog TalkBack should now work with the tab groups on Android.
now I'm wondering what are the steps in creating a tab group with TalkBack? I can't find anything in which I could create a group and I have also tried moving tabs over each other to create one. But nothing happens.
I had the feature working pretty well on the beta version of Chrome for a while. However since updating to the latest version of Chrome beta, the feature has disappeared completely.
Thanks.
Regards:
Alejandro.

[David Tseng]

Hi Chime,

>And lastly, can any1 please inform, when will we have a real "flat review"
>mode, as almost all other screen-readers have? Thanks so much in advance

All ChromeVox commands are basically flat review. If you mean "explore the layout of a user interface by layout".

For a literal interpretation, you can use speak item under mouse to review the entire screen in a 2-dimensional way. This extends to Chromebooks with touch screens via touch exploration.

In the case of a keyboard, when you are moving by line, you are essentially doing a flat review of the screen, scoped to the containing area of the page, such as a paragraph.

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