Bug 15487 – VoiceOver Read All Text command broken in HTML content

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: INVALID
• Component: Accessibility

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Overview:

VoiceOver has a Read All Text command (Control-Option-A).  According to the VoiceOver manual, "If you are interacting with the text, this command reads from the VoiceOver cursor to the end of the text." When the HTML content pane is selected, you'd expect this to read the entire webpage. Instead this fails to read the entire page in Safari 2, and gets stuck in loops in Safari 3 Beta and WebKit Nightly.

For reference, here's how I currently have VoiceOver configured.

1. In Keyboard & Mouse within System Preferences, find the Keyboard Shortcuts
tab and select "press Tab to move the focus between all controls".
2. In Universal Access within System Preferences, tick "Enable access for
assistive devices".
3. Then Open the VoiceOver Utility, select the Navigation tab.
4. Tick everything. (I've tried unticking "Group items in web pages", but the behaviour in question is still broken.)

Steps to reproduce:

1. Load the referenced URL.
2. Normally, the VoiceOver cursor will go to the first item on the page.
3. Press Control-Option-Shift-Up until you hear "Stop interacting with HTML Content". Now the entire webpage pane will be selected.
4. Press Control-Option-A to read all text.

Actual results:

In Safari 2, VoiceOver reads through a lot of the text, but suddenly will hit a bullet or link that makes it stop or jump to somewhere earlier in the page and stop. (Although invariably wrong, the behaviour isn't that consistent, so I can't be more specific.) In Safari 3 Beta and the latest WebKit Nightly, it reads the first link but then gets stuck in a loop reading the first heading over and over.

Note:

This issue isn't isolated to myself nor to this page, but is a common problem. See this thread on the macvisionaries list:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg19758.html

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

<rdar://problem/5710323>

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

This issue seems to be unreproducible in Mac OS X 10.5.2 and its default Safari/WebKit. Could you please verify that it works correctly now?

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

I can't verify that as I don't have 10.5.2, only 10.4, and on 10.4 with (final release) Safari 3.0.4 it still gets stuck in a loop on the first heading.

Discussing this bug with some VoiceOver users, there seems to be agreement that you shouldn't need to stop interacting with HTML content: the Read All command should start from wherever you are inside the HTML content, and read to the end. The VoiceOver Help in 10.4 says: "If you are interacting with the text, this command reads from the VoiceOver cursor to the end of the text". In other words, Read All is also Read to End. And this apparently doesn't work as expected even in latest OS X, since it only reads the block immediately selected by the cursor. See the following threads for discussion:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg30200.html

http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg30151.html

By contrast, if you interact with the text area in TextEdit, and move focus to a paragraph, then press Control-Option-A it reads the entire document, not just the focused paragraph.

I'm reopening for that reason, but feel free to open this as a different bug if you prefer, since the steps to reproduce would inevitably be somewhat different.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I can't verify that as I don't have 10.5.2, only 10.4, and on 10.4 with (final
> release) Safari 3.0.4 it still gets stuck in a loop on the first heading.

  This sounds like a bug in VoiceOver that was fixed in 10.5. I'll ask people who work on this to confirm this guess.

> I'm reopening for that reason, but feel free to open this as a different bug if
> you prefer, since the steps to reproduce would inevitably be somewhat
> different.

  Could you please file this bug? I don't think I understand this sufficiently well to file it myself.

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

Closing again, as a VoiceOver issue.