Screenreader doesn't announce that user is in a new space

[bhavyarm]

Kibana version: 6.x latest snapshot

Browser version: chrome latest

Browser OS version: OS X

Original install method (e.g. download page, yum, from source, etc.): from snapshots

Describe the bug: When a non-sighted user navigates to a space - User doesn't know that he is in that space.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Use voiceover
2. Have more than one space
3. Try to navigate to a space using keyboard
4. Screenreader doesn't let the user know that she is in that space.

Screenshots (if relevant):

Steps to fix that:

• 1. Make notifications showing while switching to another space: [Accesibility: spaces] Switching to another space should show a notification #36746
• 2. Make notification announced by a ScreenReader: needs wait until (Accessibility) NVDA/JAWS support for EuiGlobalToastList eui#2055 is merged into Kibana (Eui version next after 12.0.0)
• 3. Make showable notification hidden from a visual layout (ScreenReaderOnly)

[legrego]

Hey @bhavyarm,

Can you elaborate a bit on what you expect the behavior to be? When I am on the space selector screen (or using the space selector from the Kibana nav), the screen reader reads each available space when you tab through the list, and allows the space to be selected via keyboard.

Are you expecting the screen reader to announce the current space when navigating to each app within Kibana? I'm not sure if we have a mechanism for doing that, currently.

What we have now (not announcing) is consistent with the app-switching experience today. Switching between Discover and Timelion, for example, does not announce the new application when the page reloads.

I'm happy to research this further, because I do think it'd help the user experience when using a screen reader, but I likely won't prioritize this for 6.5, unless we deem this a blocker.

[bhavyarm]

@legrego it's definitely not a blocker. @aphelionz any inputs? I know I am talking about accessibility and not compliance :) Thanks!

[aphelionz]

Can you make it say "Switching to space ____" when the user clicks to select one? i.e. right before it transitions

[legrego]

Can you make it say "Switching to space ____" when the user clicks to select one? i.e. right before it transitions

@cchaos Do you know if there's a way to do this within EUI, without introducing an artificial construct? My thought here would be to add a screenreader-only alert to the DOM after clicking the link, and delay the transition long enough for the screen reader to announce this. Sounds like it could be flaky though, depending on the speed of the screen reader, and the length of the space name.

The artificial delay would also get in the way of #25930. We want to change these click handlers to use href instead of onClick events. Using href means that we won't be able to introduce a delay at all, so I'm thinking we'd need to somehow change that loading splash screen that currently just announces "Kibana"

[cchaos]

@legrego So I talked this over with the design team and the solution we agreed on is to utilize the Kibana toast service.

However, there needs to be an addition to the service that allows for screen-read-only toasts. Meaning the UI is hidden from sighted users, but the toast will be read like an alert for all screen-reader users.

There is an EUI component called EuiScreenReaderOnly that you can wrap the toast in.

[myasonik]

Closing this in favor of #98615 which is a more succinct report and solution of the same problem.