I believe that this did used to work better in previous versions of Chrome, however I also am observing the bug using Chrome Canary latest build with the latest development NEXT snapshot of NVDA as is found at http://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvda/snapshots/

This is currently the primary issue keeping me from using Chrome as my one and only browser. Therefore I'm hanging on the edge of my seat for this one to get fixed. It's rare that one piece of software does so many things exactly right in terms of accessibility.

Could someone please look at this? It's much older than some of the things that currently get attended to, and the timing issue it addresses may well affect other aspects. Do feel free to contact me in case of required clarification on what exactly I am observing here.

Ping?

Any tentative estimate as to when this will be fixed? Is NVDA still the recommended screen reader for Chrome, or has Chromevox evolved to the point of being usable on Windows and should be used instead?

@Nektar: Any update? 
Thanks!

OK, I figured out what's going on.

When you move from one item to another in the inbox, the accessible name of both items changes subtly. The previous item goes from "PreviousItemSummary Item actions" to "PreviousItemSummary", and the next item goes from "NextItemSummary" to "NextItemSummary Item actions".

In other words, the current selected list item has the word "Item actions" added at the end of its accessible name, and the previous one has that text removed from it. It's hard to catch given how long the summary of most items is.

All that is fine, but the issue is with the order in which we fire the events. We fire them in this order:

1. Name change on previous item
2. Name change on new item
3. Focus event on new item

So at the point NVDA gets the name change on the previous item, it thinks it's still focused and reads it out, even though immediately afterwards focus changes.

I confirmed that this is the source of the problem by commenting out all name change events, and the problem goes away.

Considering all of these things happen at basically the same time I think NVDA should fix it by making the focus event interrupt the name change annoucement.

I'm not sure what workaround we should do on our side. I don't think it's incorrect for us to fire the name change events.

I'm going to make a trivial repro

OK, I've attached a small standalone HTML file that reproduces the problem.

NVDA does the same incorrect behavior with this HTML when moving through the list, with either Firefox or Chrome. JAWS and VoiceOver both work fine on the same example.

I filed this NVDA issue: https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/6421

Deleted: listbox-namechange.html 1.8 KB

listbox-namechange.html 1.8 KB View Download

I have forwarded the comments and the link to this bug to the NVDA dev
list. I am hoping that they will see this and action it.

Thanks.

It might not be necessary to ping nvda_dev. Jamie, one of the NVDA devs is already CCed on this bug.

@dmazzoni Note that this behavior also occurs in Gmail with selected messages. This is the aria-labelledby fix I am working on, so I think that for Gmail both the NVDA and our bugs need to be fixed.

I've commented on the NVDA issue with more details, but in short, I don't think it's correct for us to just silence previous utterances because of a focus event. IMO, it doesn't make sense for the label of the previous item to change before the new one gets focus anyway; isn't it the act of moving the focus/selection which *causes* the name of the previous item to change? It's not incorrect to fire the name change, but firing it before focus doesn't make sense to me. Note that this is arguably an Inbox issue; if it makes changes before moving the focus, then Chrome is doing exactly what it's supposed to. All of this said, if we can hack around this without silencing speech, we'll do so.

Per Drew:
"I also find inbox to be unusable on Chrome because when you press the left or right arrow keys to move through the list of messages, the screenreader will read the message I was focused on followed by the message I am currently focused on. Huge time waster."

 In which version of Chrome was this fixed? I have noticed some improvement in this, but it is not always consistent. And I definitely have to be slower about pushing keys. Also, I don’t know if it is part of the same issue or not, but in Inbox when selecting messages, or deleting a message, those announcements are read after the entirety of the email as read.  And selection counts tend to be one off. For example, if five messages are selected and I select a sixth, NVDA reports five messages selected, and then reports six messages selected. This is with the latest canary as of yesterday. Has there been an additional changes?