Vivaldi Browser Screen Reader Accessibility
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Hello Vivaldi community,
As you can tell, I go by Minionslayer, and am extremely new here. I literally installed Vivaldi and gave it a spin a few hours ago, but was already thoroughly interested in Vivaldi's approach and customisability. I was interested in making Vivaldi feel and perform a bit more like Firefox, and I was tired of the standard (mostly unchanged) UI of Chromium-based browsers.
Upon opening, it was apparent that, while Vivaldi had come along way, it still had a ways to go before I would be willing to consider it my daily driver. And so I came here to enquire about any recent screen reader accessibility announcements or work-arounds. My biggest issue at the moment is that the entire content of the window (toolbars and all) are considered to be in the same virtual review document for my screen reader (similar to other programs built on Electron such as Discord, Skype, WhatsApp, and VSCode. While this is an undesirable side affect for me as a screen reader user, it does not render the program useless, and depending on how important it is to me, I can develop work-arounds for any issues caused by Electron. However, Vivaldi also suffers from the following issue.
When screen reader focus travels to any UI element excluding web content, pressing Tab/Shift+Tab to attempt to navigate out of it and back into the web content causes focus to only travel around the container that the UI element belongs to (such as a toolbar or pane). On the other hand, it's all too easy to navigate into a container by tabbing from web content to a toolbar. F6 can be used to change the pane in focus, but when navigating back to the web content, the virtual cursor is placed at the top of the web content since the UI and web content are one big document together.
The other related issue is that, if the focus is on an item in a toolbar, activating another element only works if it's in the same toolbar. This would make sense, but with little information to go from about the elements in a container, it can be difficult to figure out what you can click on or not. For example, it would be very easy to enter a toolbar, forget the focus was in said toolbar, and try to use a screen reader quick navigation key (such as H, B, E, L, or D) to navigate to the web content, only to realize that no keyboard focus is going to it as the focus is in a container that is part of the UI instead.
I did a quick web search, and all the info I found on screen reader accessibility in Vivaldi was out-of-date, and forum searches yielded the same results, so I figured I'd ask myself.
I've briefly tested on both the most recent stable version and snapshot, with opensource screen reader NVDA, and Windows 10 Pro 20H2.
In short, is there a fix to the issues above, and is there anything I could do to help improve Vivaldi accessibility? I'd of course be willing to provide any other info about my setup or experience to help as well.
Thanks for reading this wall of text! -
Perhaps putting the page in reader mode (either with the icon in the Adressbar or from the Page Actions menu <>) can minimize the drift of the Screen Reader, since the Reader Mode removes almost all the unrelated elements of the page.
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@Catweazle Unfortunately, neither Reader nor Break Mode minimises the elements my screen reader has access to on the page.
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@Zalex108 Apparently there's' some sort of gif in your post? I suppose now would be as good a time as ever to say that I actually don't have a monitor connected to this computer, nor have enough vision to comprehend what is in the graphic.
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@Gwen-Dragon said in Vivaldi Browser Screen Reader Accessibility:
@Zalex108 Do not such post images without any description what it shows. Our poster has low vision! #a11ly
Ups!
He's a Minion!
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@Gwen-Dragon said in Vivaldi Browser Screen Reader Accessibility:
@Minionslayer The image has a alt text and you read should read it.
Thanks for add the Alt
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@Gwen-Dragon Thanks for the tip. Doesn't look like anything in there will do the trick. Besides, web content is boarder-line impossible to reliably navigate with Vivaldi, due to the UI control keyboard focus. Someone mentioned an option that someone suggested was to make sure that the Vivaldi menu was displayed as a classic menubar instead of a toolbar. I found this page about it.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/appearance-customization/menu/ -
@Zalex108 @Gwen-Dragon What is this nonsense!? I am but a minion slayer, so it is my humble duty to make sure that no single minion lasts! Mwahahahaha!
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There are some entries on
Chrome://FlagsI don't know if they work, if fully work, or if work as expected.
Would this do the trick?
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Also,
Some useful links
ForumsCommunity 
Official Tutorials Official Help Forum Categories Modding Vivaldi Vivaldi Features Vivaldi Help Forum Markdown Panels | 
EnginesVivaldi Tutorials Issues 
Feature Requests ¿? Menus | Guides | FAQ Vivaldi How To Bug Reports --
"Off Topic Tip"
Follow the Signature's Backup | Reset link.
Take the opportunity to start a Backup plan and even create a Template Profile.
Windows 7 (x64)
Vivaldi Backup | Reset + Extra Steps -
@Zalex108 I found four options after a search for "accessibility" in flags, only relating to screen reader language change , accessibility in PDFs, and live captioning.
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Ok,
Does not help on Navigation itself.
If works, maybe gives some better support at least, for Media. -
@Zalex108 Thing is, if I can't access said media in the first place, then whether the flags will help media accessibility or not isn't relevant.
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@Zalex108 Sorry, I'm not sure what you meant.
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Referring that the problem is with all Navigation without exceptions despite that Flag since the code is old or not integrated.
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@Zalex108 Oh, gotcha. Yeah, that's correct.
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@Zalex108 I presume the devs already know about this issue, so posting a bug report wouldn't be necessary? I suppose I should also quickly mention the lack of accessibility for this forum, and the Vivaldi web client (though that's not a big deal, since I can just add it to a 3rd-party client).
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It seems already managed by Gwen, who has access to the Bug Reports:
@Gwen-Dragon said in Vivaldi Browser Screen Reader Accessibility:
@Minionslayer I tried to ping a developer and updated two bug tracker entries.
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Those are 3rd Party Platforms.
Not sure whether are PlugIns to support it or not implemented.Maybe V Team Members knows about.
@jane-n?There you may find support if not implemented at all.
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Ppafflick moved this topic from Vivaldi for Windows on
