Linux mapping for `alert`: NOTIFICATION, or ALERT?

[spectranaut]

Firefox and chrome disagree!

Chrome does NOTIFICATION, matching the spec, Firefox does ALERT. @jcsteh is concerned about changing the Firefox mappings -- @joanmarie does Orca have a preference?

[spectranaut]

Interestingly, for alertdialog, Firefox maps (incorrectly according to the spec) to DIALOG and chrome maps to ALERT (correct according to the spec): https://wpt.fyi/results/core-aam/aamtests/role/alertdialog.py?sha=c3ccf0f11f&label=pr_head

[joanmarie]

Yes, Orca has a preference. Thanks for checking!

https://docs.gtk.org/atk/enum.Role.html#alert:

ATK_ROLE_ALERT
An object which is an alert to the user. Assistive Technologies typically respond to ATK_ROLE_ALERT by reading the entire onscreen contents of containers advertising this role. Should be used for warning dialogs, etc.

Maybe the "etc." should come out of the definition... That said, when Orca sees something with the "alert" ATK/AT-SPI role, it's expecting a dialog-like thing with a message, a button or two, and not a lot of other widgets.

An ARIA alert is not a dialog-like thing. It's more like this https://docs.gtk.org/atk/enum.Role.html#notification:

ATK_ROLE_NOTIFICATION
A transitory object designed to present a message to the user, typically at the desktop level rather than inside a particular application. (Since: 2.1.0).

Granted, in the case of web applications "typically at the desktop level" doesn't apply. However, other aspects of the ATK "notification" role and the ARIA "alert" role strike me as being aligned:

• They are both messages.
• They both lack the expectation of focus management.
• They both lack the expectation of user confirmation.

IMHO, Chromium is correct.

I'm curious as to what @jcsteh's concerns are.

[jcsteh]

The alert and alertdialog situation in ARIA has always bothered me somewhat. It's unclear to me how one is supposed to present a pop-up notification (AKA "toast" or "doorhanger") which does not get focus but which does contain actionable controls. alert doesn't say it can contain controls (but nor does it explicitly say it can't, although it strongly hints at it with the use of the word "message"). alertdialog explicitly requires that focus be moved inside it.

This is the crux of the problem for Firefox. Firefox has a bunch of pop-up notifications (doorhangers, toasts, whatever), such as permission or password notifications, which explicitly do not get focus, but which do contain controls the user needs to know about. Even from the ATK descriptions above, it's unclear to me whether alert or notification is the correct ATK role. Right now, Firefox exposes them as ATK alert and I'm concerned that changing this would break Orca's handling of Firefox's notification pop-ups.

Note that Firefox's UI is basically just web content, which is why we can't just use a different, non-web-exposed role for those notifications. But if Orca needs different roles for these two cases, I guess I can find a way; e.g. map role="alert" to ATK NOTIFICATION for explicit web content but map role="alert" to ATK ALERT for Firefox UI web content. I do think this is a more general problem though as noted in my first paragraph: some web apps want to present such notifications too and there is currently no "explicit" way to do this in ARIA.

[spectranaut]

Reading this, it seems to me Joanie is saying Orca expects ATK_ROLE_NOTIFICATION to be used for the pop-up notifications/doorhangers/toasts/whatever thing, covering your description of the Firefox UI role="alerts".

Right now, Firefox exposes them as ATK alert and I'm concerned that changing this would break Orca's handling of Firefox's notification pop-ups.

I wonder if you have an example that would be easy to trigger? Maybe you don't have to map the UI role="alerts" and the web content role="alerts" separately, and seeing an example could help us figure that out.

[jcsteh]

Sure. An easy way to trigger a Firefox doorhanger is to go to https://browserleaks.com/geo. That should pop up a location permission doorhanger which contains controls but does not get focus.