Chrome M91 Accessibility Engineering Release Notes

[Emily Scharff]

Hi everyone,

Chrome version 91 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. 

Highlights

• Launched a tutorial for ChromeVox touch. Users can access this tutorial on their Chromebooks by flipping their Chromebook into tablet mode, opening the ChromeVox menus, finding the ‘ChromeVox tutorial’ item, and then activating it. (Bug 869900)

• Live Captions now supports more style preferences including background and text color. (Change 2783002, Bug 1055150, Bug 1191510)

All platforms

• Fixed alerts where role=alert is added dynamically. (Change 2743289, Bug 1185694)

• Fixed a title formatting error in the Live Captions feature. (Change 2795303, Bug 1055150, Bug 1191390)

• Accessibility is now automatically disabled when not used. (Change 2792725, Bug 1143047)

• Exclude empty generated content nodes from the accessibility tree. (Change 2764615, Bug 1129418)

• Screen reader users can now navigate by paragraph in lists in Google Docs. (Change 2794447)

• Devtools

• Fixed an issue where VoiceOver couldn’t access Toolbar inputs with arrow keys (Change 2798583, Bug 1194771)

• Made CSS and inline style links keyboard accessible. (Change 2720721, Bug 1181973)

• Fixed an issue where contrast ratio for the graph elements in 'Network' tab was not meeting the required ratio. (Change 2798581, Bug 1194762)

• Fixed an issue where screen readers weren’t reading the network summary bar when it changed. (Change 2812047, Bug 1196883)

Chrome on Mac

• Ensured that VoiceOver announces the proper number of columns in grids and tables. (Change 2739219, Bug 1152126, Bug 1172508, Bug 1182465)

• Enables Voice Control's "show numbers" command to show numbers in web content. (Change 2773520)

• Caption styles set on MacOS dynamically update on Chrome without requiring a restart. (Change 2796511, Bug 982475)

• Improves screen reader accessibility for the signed in flow of Profile Creation, notably fixes issues with focus trapping and alignment. (Change 2690382, Bug 1177216)

Chrome on Windows

• Fixed an issue where list items were being truncated when moving by character. (Change 2784748, Bug 1186339)

• Fixed an issue where NVDA wasn’t reading the title of the secure payment confirmation dialog. (Change 2738717, Bug 1184934)

• Hyperlinks in contenteditable are now accessible via keyboard context menu. (Change 2774436, Bug 1186416)

Chrome OS

• ChromeVox

• Updated the link for keyboard shortcuts in the ChromeVox tutorial. (Change 2792070)

• ChromeVox is less verbose when announcing changes to downloads. (Change 2726025, Bug 1137880)

• ChromeVox reads context first when reading suggestions, insertions, and deletions. (Change 2800476, Bug 1188758)

• Touch gestures can be used to interact with the tutorial. (Change 2768298, Bug 1183892)

• Added role=separator support to ChromeVox. (Change 2737965, Bug 1184825)

• Added ChromeVox support for the pound sterling symbol (£). (Change 2727993, Bug 1166609)

• Fixed speech responsiveness in ChromeVox with the default text-to-speech engine in Chrome OS. (Change 2753567, Bug 1177475)

• Made it possible to exit Learn Mode using a two finger swipe left gesture or a space with Z command on a braille display. (Change 2728113, Bug 1003607)

• ChromeVox announces aria-current when applicable. (Change 2773710, Bug 1150076)

• The ChromeVox announcement during device setup now fires after 20 seconds of idle. (Change 2752922, Bug 1186502)

• The ChromeVox announcement during device setup can be canceled by clicking the status tray in the bottom right corner of the screen. (Change 2795505, Bug 1186501)

• Fixed labelling and announcements of links inside headings. (Change 2774054, Bug 1095160)

• Added a confirmation dialog before darkening the screen until it is explicitly confirmed by the user. (Change 2765388, Bug 1103799)

Chrome on Android

• Less frequent invalid content error messages on input fields on Android. (Change 2751003)

• Fixed an issue where some Android nodes were mistakenly being labeled as links even though they did not contain a URL. (Change 2779697, Bug 1176432)

• Children of certain focusable nodes will now be exposed for swipe navigation on Android. (Change 2716625, Bug 1165929)

• Undo button after closing a tab times out after 30 seconds, allowing accessibility service users to interact with the button. (Change 2805891, Bug 1150532)

• Added a close button to the site information dialog, improving usability for Talkback users. (Change 2697098, Bug 1061552)