Investigate into JAWS support

[isidorn]

Look into how VS Code works with JAWS and identify the current limitations.

@GS-Avaluka feedback is very welcome

[isidorn]

I just gave JAWS a spin on my Windows machine. Here are my findings:

• File explorer, works well overall but every item has a suffic "To move through or expand items use the arrows keys" @ggordon-vispero is this expected, does JAWS read this suffic because focus is on a tree item. Same happens for list items, so this feels like a JAWS thing
• Editor works well overall but I noticed punctionations like , . are not being read. Is this a JAWS setting? Or should JAWS respect that we set the role code on the Container of the editor?
• Main Menus and context Menus seem to work fine
• Navigation seems to work fine
• Chrome nicely detects that JAWS is attached

I am not a screen reader user, so my findings are of course not complete. It would be great to get much more feedback from users.

fyi @jfayre @RussellSprouts as you have filled JAWS related issue to this repository

[ggordon-vispero]

I too will try this over the weekend and report back.

[isidorn]

@ggordon-vispero awesome, thanks!

[cannona]

The first two items you mention are in fact expected Jaws behavior, and not something which applications can control. I suspect that the extra information will not be read if the user decreases the verbosity, but I have not confirmed this. Regardless, there's nothing you can do about it.

[MarcoZehe]

The punctuation is also a JaWS setting, and role "code" is very new. It is slatted for WAI-ARIA 1.3, and WAI-ARIA 1.2 hasn't even been finalized yet, but both Firefox and Chromium already support it because it was low-hanging fruit. Screen Reader support will need to be added for this first. Orca is, so far, the only screen reader that does it, and AFAIK only in Master.

[Menelion]

Hi @isidorn and thanks for this, it's greatly appreciated!
for me the main issues with JAWS are:

1. As the editor is a forms-mode environment, JAWS does not speak indentation there even if turned on.
2. Even if it did speak the indentation in editors, it would not differ between editor and non-editor parts of VS Code. I.e., when in the trees or even in virtual cursor mode, you'll hear superfluous indentation markings which is as annoying as not having them at all. @ggordon-vispero Probably it's something that needs to be tweaked in JAWS as well as separating VS Code settings from Chrome ones.
3. this is very intermittent and extremely hard to describe, but JAWS sometimes loses focus and hangs for some time, especially in big trees and lists. the best way to reproduce it is to replicate my setup: install Remote SSH, SSH to some other machine with a large codebase on it and try to work fast.

Thank you again, and I hope my two favorite companies (Microsoft and Vispero) will come with a robust solution that would allow us to work with our preferred screen reader and there won't be people moving from JAWS to whatever anymore (see the Gitter chat).

[isidorn]

Thanks all for feedback.
@Menelion We would love to improve this, however I am not sure what can be done on the VS code side for this.

1. Is there something in VS code which we can do such that the editor is no in forms-mode environment?
2. Why doesn't JAWS use different role we set. For example the editor has the role textbox and the trees have role tree
3. This might be due to a large number of accessilibity events. @joanmarie already investeged in this for the Orca screen reader and this might be an underlying Chrome issue https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1050718 Please note that I am only speculating here

Overall to improve with JAWS we would need somebody from Vispero to share his thoughts. So let's see what @ggordon-vispero has to say.

[Menelion]

@isidorn Just investigated. Yes, it seems, you can do nothing here, sorry. @ggordon-vispero It's a JAWS issue. If you want more info, please chime in, I'll write you privately.

[ggordon-vispero]

@Menelion , please write me with additional details. I have already noticed the JAWS failure to announce intentation and agree that it's an issue on our side. If you have additional JAWS specific details about either indentation or the JAWS hanging
please write to me privately. I think you already have my contact info. If not it's first Initial followed by my last name.