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Thanks for submitting this issue. Please also check if it is already covered by an existing one, like:

• [Accessibility]A11y_VSCode_ViewExtensions_Screenreader:NVDA does not read the content. (#51760)
• A11y_VSCode_Welcome_ScreenReader: NVDA reads "clickable" with each list,listitem,buttons,links,checkbox etc. (#51077)

This works fine on mac with VoiceOver, but not on windows.
Not sure if this is low hanging fruit, leaving to @chrmarti and @bpasero to decide

That sounds like a bug in NVDA to me, but maybe we can tweak the ARIA label for inputs. We could also see if there is a aria-placeholder attribute to use but then we should use it everywhere.

@bpasero would you be willing to do some tweaking for this?
We need it for a better accessibility grade.
Anyways assigning to October so Christof looks once he is back if you do not have time this week

I looked into it and have not good explanation for the behaviour. This seems to be triggered by the fact that the input box has a aria-activedescendant pointing to a tree/list item below. If I remove that, the placeholder is correctly announced.

Our only hope may be to announce the placeholder using aria.alert() which is ugly too.

We always used the aria-activedescendant trick since the beginning and I cannot remember we had this issue before so we could also try to reach out to NVDIA folks (@alexandrudima I think you did that for the editor a while ago, maybe you know the name still)

@bpasero you can always reach out to this repo here https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda
Or just find the top commiter and ping him here :)

This works for me with QuickOpen, but not with QuickInput. Both use aria-activedescendant, I wonder what the difference is.

@chrmarti maybe tree vs list ARIA roles?

Yes might be. @chrmarti not that I changed one of them to use listitem which might be a bad change. Now I am checking the behavior on windows actually..

You're right, with your change reverted it no longer works with QuickOpen.

Not focusing any element in the list lets it read the placeholder. This was supposed to be fixed with #57501 which checks if it is in screen reader mode before setting the focus, but there is a bug that still makes it focus an element in most cases. Will fix.

Actually should have worked before when screen reader mode was on. Closing as duplicate.

/duplicate #57501

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