Loss of focus for screenreaders in BBB-public-chat-window

[Michael Kuhlmann]

Hi to the group,

yesterday I had a large meeting with round about 60 persons on my server, running BBB 2.79. All of us using screenreaders, because of our visual impairment. Many of us wrote messages in the public chat. I was the moderator of the meeting and couldN't read the chat-history on the website properly. When ever I or another user tried to navigate the chat-area, the focus got lost and the cursor was jumping around on the website. Many users could reproduce this behaviour, browser- and screenreader independent. Is it an accessibility-issue, or do we have to configure our screenreaders different? 

Thanks in advance for helpful information concerning this and best.

Michael

[anton.g...@blindsidenetworks.com]

Hi!

Thank you for reporting this! We had a similar report recently (https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/20621) which we're still investigating but it had to do with polling response location.

Do you recall where the cursor was jumping _to_? Other than public chat and audio, what other portions of BigBlueButton were used in your meeting? Were Shared Notes in use? Polling, etc?

- Anton

[Michael Kuhlmann]

Hi Anton,

pols and shared notes weren't in use. People were investigating the UI, changing the status and writing into the chat. When reading the chat-history, the cursor jumped to the top of the page, everytime, a new chat-message was written. The workaround was copying the chat-history into a text file in order to get the time, reading all of the history, because that's impossible with a braille display or a speech-driven screenreader if the cursor is moving to the top of the page around within seconds.

Thanks for investigating and best.

Michael

[anton.g...@blindsidenetworks.com]

Hi Michael,

Thank you for sharing this additional information! I opened a github issue to track this: https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton/issues/20697

If you could, please share a bit more about what an end user's setup would be like - for example Windows, NVDA, or different OS, screen reader setup?

Anton