Accessibility: Orca screen reader doesn't work as expected

[Luis Felipe]

Hi,

Trying to do a quick check of the accessibility of Guix's website, I found that 
Orca doesn't work well (using Guix System 037c2b6 with GNOME 40.4). 


One important thing that doesn't work is reading web content on any browser 
(epiphany, icecat, chromium), so could you check if you can reproduce? If you 
can, I'll report the issue to the tracker then.

STEPS

These steps assume you are logged into a GNOME desktop session.

1. Press Super+Alt+S (after a couple of seconds, you should hear a robotic 
voice say "Screen reader activated", or something like that in your session 
language)
2. Start Icecat (or any other browser)
3. Go to https://guix.gnu.org/ (wait for the page to load completely)
4. Press the tab key to navigate through the links of the page

EXPECTED RESULT

This is what I expect from my experience with Orca on Debian 11.

In step 2, you should hear the voice indicating that a window was launched.

In step 3:

+ when typing the address, you should hear the voice read out loud every key 
you type.
+ when you hit Enter and the page loads, you should hear the voice reading the 
title of the page, and give you some information about its structure and 
navigation.

In step 4, you should hear the voice read the text of the focused link.

UNEXPECTED RESULT

In step 2, I don't hear the voice indicating that a window was launched.

In step 3:

+ when typing the address, I don't hear the voice read out loud every key I 
type.
+ when I hit Enter and the page loads, I don't hear the voice reading the title 
of the page, and it doesn't give me information about its structure and 
navigation.

In step 4, I don't hear the voice read the text of the focused link.

🙠🙢 · 🙠🙢 · 🙠🙢 · 🙠🙢

Another important thing that doesn't work is the modifier key to command Orca 
to do other things. For example, pressing Insert+Space does not start the 
configuration window of the screen reader. So you can't follow many of the 
instructions in Orca's manual because they depend on the modifier key.

However, Orca doesn't seem to be completely broken as you can hear the voice 
read things sometimes. For example, if you start GNOME Help and navigate with 
tab, the voice reads out loud the links; or if you activate caret navigation 
(press F7), the voice reads out loud the lines you focus with the arrow keys 
(which is pretty much the same behavior you should expect when using web 
browsers).

I don't know how to debug this, so any help welcome.

I wonder if https://issues.guix.gnu.org/28088 has anything to do with all 
this...

Oh, and I found some things that could be changed in the website to improve the 
experience when browsed with screen readers. I'm taking note and will report 
the issues soon.

P.S.: I couldn't help to think that even though Orca works on Debian, the 
reader itself seems to have important issues. The robotic voice is not very 
clear, reading gets delayed for some reason, then the list of things to read 
accumulate and the voice starts reading old things out of context. The reader 
can't detect the language of the text it is reading and so it can't read 
multilingual content. I don't understand how blind people use libre systems. 


Screen readers seem like really awesome projects to work on, I wonder why they 
are not more advanced...

---
Luis Felipe López Acevedo
https://luis-felipe.gitlab.io/

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