Comments on: ARIA in Gmail #2: Enhancing the Chat experience

By: Joyce Espy

Joyce Espy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:07:09 +0000

Okay, I am sorry. My comment last night was stupid and based on the panic of the barely technical literate. What is actually happening is that the chat window does not seem to be opening. I have been using the pass through key command (I have JAWS 8.0) and I can get to the contacts, but the chat window wil not appear, and it will not say that we are chatting, which it did before. Would a JAWS upgrade help, or is ther something a little less expensive I could try?

By: Joyce Espy

Joyce Espy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:59:32 +0000

My company uses GTAlk for communication, and I have gratefully followed your instructions on how to use it with JAWS until now. The last few days it won’t work. What should I do? Have the changed it? Also having trouble reading my mail, which is actually GMail witha different domain.

By: The WAI-ARIA Windows screen reader shootout « The BAT Channel

The WAI-ARIA Windows screen reader shootout « The BAT Channel — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:16:57 +0000

[...] has an integrated Google Talk widget that I talked about before. The following should be [...]

By: The WAI-ARIA Windows screen reader shootout « AccessTech News

The WAI-ARIA Windows screen reader shootout « AccessTech News — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:16:21 +0000

[...] has an integrated Google Talk widget that I talked about before. The following should be [...]

By: The WAI-ARIA Windows screen reader shootout « Marco’s accessibility blog

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:00:01 +0000

[...] has an integrated Google Talk widget that I talked about before. The following should be [...]

By: Marco

Marco — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:04:34 +0000

@Ronnie No, full ARIA support as is also now in the WCAG 2.0 is only supported in Firefox 3.0 and above. However, since Firefox 2.0 has reached its end of life, I do not see this as a problem at all.

By: Ronnie

Ronnie — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:33:22 +0000

Is this also possible for Firefox 2.0?

By: Luís de Melo

Luís de Melo — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:17:47 +0000

Are new Gmail Chat with voice and video accessible for the blind and low vision people?

By: Marco’s accessibility blog » Blog Archive » JAWS 10 public beta’s Firefox 3 support: A review

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:59:11 +0000

[...] Region support in Google Talk, as I describe in my ARIA in GMail #2 post, is flaky. Sometimes new text that comes in gets spoken, sometimes it doesn’t. I [...]

By: pvagner

pvagner — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 08:56:20 +0000

OK, I think I have understoot it better after a bit of chatting with Jamie. Gmail is very complex application so my assumptions may not be correct. But anyway I am going to post what I have found out so others might correct me and possibly help to find where is the problem.
When a gmail is loaded and a conversation is open inline, the document loaded into firefox contains a paragraph. Inside this paragraph the conversation is taking place. The document loaded into firefox has some iframes at the same level like this paragraph. These iframes might contain other documents and other elements inside. This is all found out using NVDA’s object navigation so it’s IA2 objects hierarchy. Now the problematic part. While focus is in the multiline edit field (an input area of a conversation window) I can perfectly move upwards in the IA2 objects hierarchy. Once I stop at the paragraph I started my explanation with it automagically turns out to be reported as invisible and it is also reported to have no children. So this is why NVDA can’t render it into the buffer I guess. Gmail can focus an object inside it because it has stored ids id or something.
This is with latest stable version of firefox 3.0.1. I will perhaps test with more recent build of firefox just to see if it might make a difference.

By: Marco

Marco — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:56:40 +0000

Hi Peter,

yes I’ve noticed that there are problems with displaying chat content with JAWS when processed inline. The content is there, at least JAWS however doesn’t pick up on it. I tested this with NVDA, too, and thought I had it working, but now I see inconsistent results, too.

And yes, I tested with the English Gmail interface, since the German interface that I normally would use didn’t provide all the markup enhancements yet. While it also gave the contact list a role of list, and the items a role of option, it did not yet implement the aria-activedescendant attribute to track the focus. So I decided to do my testing with the English interface.

By: pvagner

pvagner — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:37:49 +0000

This is great news. I have everything working as described in the article except of ability to reread what has been posted when the chat window is shown in the sidebar. I am using NVDA. Once the input area in a chat window has focus and I disable virtual buffer pass through focus shifts back to the main site when pressing up arrow. if chat is displayed in a new window then it’s all working great. Do you think NVDA needs improvements in this area or might this be a gmail issue?
A thing worth noting might be that I am using gmail set to display its interface in slovak. I have seen rumours that english version is the only most up to date and other localized versions are following shortly.
Anyway I am amazed. thanks for all these postings.

By: Marco

Marco — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:25:36 +0000

Gry, thanks for your comment! But would you mind reposting it in English. I doubt a lot of my readers, including also the author, understand Polish.

By: gry planszowe

gry planszowe — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:12:00 +0000

Ciekawa strona, trafilem tu przypadkowo, ale od dzis bede wpadal czesciej, pozdro

By: Do WAI-ARIA - Google Is! - The Paciello Group Blog

Do WAI-ARIA - Google Is! - The Paciello Group Blog — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:21:11 +0000

[...] ARIA in Gmail #2: Enhancing the Chat experience describes the use of aria-activedescendant and Live Regions in Gmail, with details of Screen Reader and Browser support. [...]