Upgrade StorageAvailable for beta testing: Improved accessibility of citation dialog
The latest Zotero 7 beta features a major accessibility overhaul of the default citation dialog. It should now be fully usable via VoiceOver, NVDA, and JAWS, and keyboard usage is also now improved.
If you had previously switched to the "classic" citation dialog for screen-reader compatibility, you'll want to disable that from the bottom of the Cite section of the Zotero settings to try out these changes.
If you're able to test the new version, please let us know how it works for you.
If you had previously switched to the "classic" citation dialog for screen-reader compatibility, you'll want to disable that from the bottom of the Cite section of the Zotero settings to try out these changes.
If you're able to test the new version, please let us know how it works for you.
Two nits, one question:
Nit 1: The "Open in My Library" (or equivalent) button does show cursor focus when selected, but does not provide visual feedback when pressed via Space (though it does work).
Nit 2: The grey subheadings (like "Cited Items", "Selected Items", etc.) are not announced at all. I'm not entirely sure what the convention here is, but they seem important.
Question: There are two positions for the cursor behind a reference that is selected in the quick format bar: one that "selects" that reference, another one that doesn't. ctrl+down only works to open the details dialog in the former state. I believe that's new? Is that on purpose/necessary? It took me a while to figure out why the shortcut wasn't working anymore.
7.0.0-beta.73+398454f85 (64-bit) Word-Addin does not start. Instead, I use 7.0.0-beta.68+c31a40c74 (64-bit)
With NVDA the citation dialog works great. You can read and navigate every necessary information.
With Jaws there are several limitations (see both screenshots):
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u7841656/xtxoo9sv72pvxqmu6aqn.png
“To chance selection use arrow keys”. The options to select are not spoken (everything in the green rectangle on the first screenshot), accept the list of the citation styles at the top.
When you have selected citations, you can navigate between them with the arrow keys, but without spoken feedback. So you do not know, which citation has the focus and you are gong to edit. That is especially important when the order changes because of the sorting citation-option. You can easily open the box to enter page, prefix and suffix. You can not force Jaws to read out the information in the blue rectangle on the screenshot and it is not read out automatically. Sometimes you can get to hear it by JawsKey+B, but not in all cases. You can reach the fields page, prefix and suffix with the arrow keys. You do not get a spoken feedback in which field the cursor is. You cannot control entered text with the arrow keys due to missing feedback from Jaws. It is the same thing with the editor.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u7841656/u9s4cfww712pgzvhzw2m.png
I have now had a chance to try the new Citation dialogue using NVDA. It didn't work quite as well for me. I was able to enter a search term and find articles and books containing it and select one of them. However, I don't know how to get into the part of the Citation dialogue Using the keyboard, where I enter the page number or any prefixes or suffixes. I did manage to get there using the mouse, but it should be more obvious if and how I can get there using the keyboard. Maybe it's possible and I just didn't see how to do it.
You can also always just type a page number (or the letter "p" plus the page number) immediately after you choose an item to add it to the citation, without opening the panel.
I would second @Bkronhardt1's report, it doesn't work quite as well with JAWS though. I am able to hear the fields page, prefix, suffix when I tab through the dialogue using JAWS, but I can't read what I type there. It works with Narrator though, so I'm not sure if JAWS tries to access the info I type differently than do NVDA and Narrator.
Thank you.
For example, when a search input or a cited item is focused, in the end it should say that you can click Escape to discard all the changes and close the dialog or click Enter to save edits to this citation. Do these not get read out to you?
The button to save the actual citation (arrow at the very right labelled as "Save edits to this citation") was indeed not included into the tab navigation because Enter/Return does that on most focused elements without having to tab to another component. The only exception is when you type a query and then navigate a list of references with arrowUp/arrowDown, in which case Enter adds it to the citation.
Lastly, Shift-Enter/Return will always save the current state of the citation regardless of where the focus is or what is selected.
@abaevbog Yes, the messages are indeed read out, however, I only heard them when I tried using the dialogue after I sent my previous message.
The dialogue is different from how we use standard dialogues. The help messages make it more verbose.
Often, efficient screen reader users will not listen to everything their screen reader says but press a key to do something or navigate to the next item when they think they have heard what they need to know. This will interrupt the screen reader, because it will then read the newly focused element. This is why I didn't hear the help messages the first time.
I do not expect to hear a help message after hearing the current item in the citation being read to me. However, please don't have the help message read before the item, because this will make adding citations inefficient.
For now, I would recommend adding the "save edits" button to the tab order, because when editing a citation doesn't work, as it didn't for me yesterday, we will probably look for that button to press enter on it.
Yesterday, I was trying to edit a citation that was already included in my document, however, the page number was missing. I opened the citation dialogue again, entered the page number, pressed enter and again enter to close the main dialogue, but the page number didn't appear.
I'm wondering if it might be better to have a message telling the user to press some key combination if they require help as soon as they open the dialogue. This could open a message box containing some instructions or a list of shortcut keys. This is a strategy employed in JAWS. You can press a specified hotkey in each application and JAWS will show a box telling you which key combinations to use there. If you didn't need to include the other messages that are now read automatically, it would make the dialogue less verbose and more pleasant to use.
I am not sure if this suggestion would really be the best way to implement it, I would be more comfortable suggesting this if there were other screen reader users here commenting on this.
It can be tiresome to listen to artificial speech your entire working day and this is why we will often not listen to everything, because there are applications telling us things automatically when we don't need to know them (Microsoft Teams is an example of an app that is very verbose, because devs want to help) but at the end of the day it's exhausting to hear messages all day you don't need.
I guess I'm not sure what to suggest, but I wanted to describe the dilemma so you know why the current solution might not work as well as you thought it should.
We'll think about the help messages, though. Thanks for the feedback on that.