NVDA does not pronounce "aria-orientation" attribute

[mpreyskurantov]

Use the following HTML markup to reproduce the issue:

<div 
    tabindex="0"
    role="slider"
    aria-valuemin="0"
    aria-valuemax="100"
    aria-valuenow="10"
    aria-orientation="vertical"></div>

NVDA reads this markup in the following manner:

slider 10

The expected pronounced state is the following:

vertical slider 10

This issue is reproducible in the Firefox and IE browsers.

[mpreyskurantov]

Yes, this issue is still actual. Having this option would be a good addition for NVDA functionality when operating a slider / trackbar UI element.

[ThickGreen]

I would like to point out that aria-orientation is also used for the following roles which are impacted by this bug:

• scrollbar
• select
• separator
• slider
• tablist
• toolbar
• listbox
• menu
• menubar
• radiogroup
• tree
• treegrid

[MarcoZehe]

Firefox exposes aria-orientation, NVDA needs to use it to indicate the orientation of such controls.

[feerrenrut]

I don't know how aria-orientation is commonly used, so it's very hard to set a priority on this. My assumption is that this is used rarely, and in most cases this information would be verbosity that users didn't want. The MDN page for aria-orientation is unclear about it's intended usage and interpretation.

I'm interested to look at examples of where this is used / hear what expectations are for UX on this.

[MarcoZehe]

Examples I can think of right off the top of my head:

• Horizontal versus vertical sliders. Horizontal ones are manipulated with arrows left and right, vertical ones with up and down. I remember seeing those in Windows for volume vs. balance in sound control.
• Horizontal versus vertical tab lists. I fell into a trap once where 1Password 7 has a vertical tab strip in its Settings dialog, and consequently, arrows up and down are used to switch tabs rather than left and right.

[jcsteh]

Sounds feel too obscure here. Non-standard orientation isn't very common, and sounds require frequent encounters and relative context to be learned intuitively. My suggestion would be to report the orientation only when it isn't the default. For example, tab controls are usually horizontally oriented, so we should only report vertical for those. Of course, that will involve teaching NVDA about default orientations for various roles.

[feerrenrut]

@jcsteh I agree, that is probably the most clear thing to do. I would guess it should precede role i.e "vertical tab control" however a horizontal one (the expected orientation) should be announced just as "tab control"

I think a priority 3 is appropriate.

[kloots]

Wanted to call out we use aria-orientation on the tablist in Slack and without this customers wouldn't otherwise know they need to use up/down to navigate the tablist.

[ianthedev]

Vertical tabs are quite common nowadays. Please consider placing a priority on fixing this issue. Thanks.

[paulGeoghegan]

Just wondering if there has been any progress on this? I feel like vertical tabs are actually fairly common now and it would be great to get this fixed.

[Adriani90]

@SaschaCowley I agree with #6283 (comment) posted by Jamie.
In fact, I think NVDA should report the vertical or horizontal orientation of the elements, including their default orientation, even if there is no orientation atribute, if this information is available.

More details:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Attributes/aria-orientation

[paulGeoghegan]

@Adriani90 agreed otherwise the user would also need to be aware of the default which doesn't make a lot of sense given that they may not be able to see the orientation and would need to encounter a non-default version in order to be aware.

[jcsteh]

Reporting the default orientation does create extra verbosity in all cases though. Extra verbosity that isn't strictly necessary reduces efficiency. It's a tricky trade-off particularly when considering new users, so I'm not going to argue beyond this point, but I do think this needs to be taken into consideration. Hearing "horizontal" every time I encounter a tab control when the majority of them are horizontal is going to get very annoying very fast.

[SaschaCowley]

Personally, I tend to agree with @jcsteh that reporting default orientation is going to get very annoying, very fast. I'm also not convinced that it's necessary: I see the use-case for reporting orientation, but the default is (usually) going to be the most common, so it makes most sense to report the exceptions. Also, while it's not a particularly good reason, I would note that we've managed this long without reporting any orientation information.