## The basics
- [x] I [validated my changes](https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/contribute/core#making_and_verifying_a_change)
## The details
### Resolves
Fixes#9466
### Proposed Changes
Ensures `FieldInput`'s ARIA labels are recomputed when an invalid value is attempted to be set.
### Reason for Changes
Previously the `FieldInput` would continuously update its ARIA label as the value changed, including for invalid values. If the editor was cancelled this would correctly revert but if an invalid value was attempted to be saved then it would cancel the update but not correct the ARIA label.
### Test Coverage
No new tests are needed for this experimental change. This has been manually verified locally using `FieldNumber` in Core's advanced playground.
### Documentation
No documentation changes are needed for this experimental change.
### Additional Information
None.
## The basics
- [x] I [validated my changes](https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/contribute/core#making_and_verifying_a_change)
## The details
### Resolves
Fixes#9301Fixes#9312Fixes#9313
Fixes part of #9304
### Proposed Changes
This introduces a variety of specific changes to resolve several issues for screen reader work, including introducing fundamental support for field labeling.
Specifically:
- Field labels have been simplified to only use their custom defined ARIA name otherwise they are null (and thus should be ignored for readout purposes) which wraps up the remaining high-level work for #9301 (#9450 tracks more specific follow-up work to improve upon what's been established at this point). The PR also introduces an ARIA override for number inputs in math blocks so that the readout is correct for them.
- Bubble labeling is more explicit now which is useful for mutators (#9312), warnings, and comments. The general improvement for bubbles wraps up the remaining work for #9313 as well since the core issue was resolved in #9351. By default a bubble has no ARIA label.
- #9304 is partly being addressed here with the change to field images: they are no longer being added to the accessibility node tree unless they are actually navigable (that is, clickable). Part of #9304's goal is to remove extraneous nodes.
- Finally, a typo was fixed for 'replaceable blocks' since these were not reading out correctly. This was noticed in passing and isn't directly related to the other issues.
### Reason for Changes
This PR is largely being used as a basis for one particularly significant issue: #9301. Field labeling has undergone several iterations over the past few months and the team seems comfortable sticking with a "do as little as possible" approach when determining the label, thus justifying the need for expecting more specific customization (i.e. #9450). To this end it's important to be clear that getting fields to a good state is not actually "done" but the need to track it as a large incomplete thing has ended. Note that one important part of #9301 was updating field plugins to be accessible--this largely seems unnecessary as-is as it will be completely dependent on the needs of future user tests. The long-term plan will need to account for making all fields in `blockly-samples` accessible (per #9307).
Some of the terminology used here (e.g. for bubbles) will likely need to change after user testing, but it's important to establish that _something_ correct is communicated even if the terminology may require scaffolding and/or refinement.
It's important to note that while non-clickable field images are no longer in the node graph, their ARIA presence still exists as part of the fluent block labeling solution. That is, `FieldImage`'s alt text is used as part of constructing a fluent block label (sometimes to confusing effect--see #9452).
### Test Coverage
No tests needed since these are experimental changes and do not change existing test behaviors.
### Documentation
No documentation changes are needed for these experimental changes.
### Additional Information
None.
* fix: Miscellaneous improvements for screenreader support.
* fix: Include field name in ARIA label.
* fix: Update block ARIA labels when inputs are shown/hidden.
* fix: Make field row label generation more robust.
* fix: Improve narration and navigation of C-shaped blocks.
* chore: Satisfy the linter.
* chore: Refactor and comment `getBlockNavigationCandidates()`.
* refactor: Reduce code duplication in `LineCursor`.
* fix: Add missing case when labeling connections.
Read value-inputs and fields in place and recursively.
Announce block shape, number of inputs and number of children
where appropriate.
Co-authored-by: Matt Hillsdon <matt.hillsdon@microbit.org>
* fix: set activedescendant correctly on toolbox
* fix: dont manually set posinset for toolbox categories
* fix: dont set activedescendant on toolbox at all
## The basics
- [x] I [validated my changes](https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/contribute/core#making_and_verifying_a_change)
## The details
### Resolves
Fixes#8206Fixes#8210Fixes#8213Fixes#8255Fixes#8211Fixes#8212Fixes#8254
Fixes part of #9301
Fixes part of #9304
### Proposed Changes
This PR completes the remaining ARIA roles and properties needed for all core fields. Specifically:
- #8206: A better name needed to be used for the checkbox value, plus there was an ARIA property missing for actually representing the checkbox state. The latter needed to be updated upon toggling the checkbox, as well. These changes bring checkbox fields in compliance with the ARIA checkbox pattern documented here: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/checkbox/.
- #8210: This one required a lot of changes in order to adapt to the ARIA combobox pattern documented here: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/combobox/. Specifically:
- Menus needed to have a unique ID that's also exposed in order to link the combobox element to its menu when open.
- ARIA's `activedescendant` proved very useful in ensuring that the current dropdown selection is correctly read when the combobox has focus but its menu isn't opened.
- The default properties available for options (label and value) aren't very good for readout, so a custom ARIA property was added for much clearer option readouts. This is only demonstrated for the math arithmetic block for now.
- The text element is normally hidden for ARIA but it's useful in conjunction with `activedescendant` to represent the current value selection.
- Images have been handled here as well (partly as part of #8255) by leveraging their alt text for readouts. This actually seems to work quite well both for current value and selection.
- #8213: Much of the improvements here come from the combobox (`FieldDropdown`) improvements explained above. However one additional bit was done to provide an explicit 'Variable <name>' readout for the purpose of clarity. This demonstrates some contextualization of the value of the field which may be a generally useful pattern to copy in other field contexts.
- #8255: Image fields have been refined since they were redundantly specifying 'image' when an `image` ARIA role is already being used. Now only the alt text is supplied along with the role context. Note that images need special handling since they can sometimes be navigable (such as when they have click handlers).
- #8211: Text input fields have had their labeling improved like all other fields, and the field's value is now exposed via its `text` element since this will show up as a `StaticText` node in the accessibility tree and automatically be read as part of the field's value.
- #8212: This gets the same benefits as the previous point since those improvements were included for both text and number input. However, existing `valuemin` and `valuemax` ARIA properties have been removed. It seems these are really only useful when introducing a slider mechanism (see https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/slider/) and from testing seems to not really be utilized for the basic text input that `FieldNumber` currently uses. It may be the case that this is a better pattern to use in the future, but it's more likely that other custom fields could benefit from more specific patterns like slider rather than `FieldNumber` being changed in that way.
- #8254 and part of #9304: Field labels have been completely removed from the accessibility node tree since they can never be navigated to (as #8254 explains all labels will be included as part of the block's ARIA label itself for readout parity with navigation options).
Note that it doesn't cover external fields (such as those supplied in blockly-samples), nor does it fully set up the infrastructure work for those. Ultimately that work needs to happen as part of #9301.
Beyond the role work above, this PR also introduces some fundamental work for #9301. Specifically:
- It demonstrates how block definitions could be used to introduce accessibility label customizations (in this case for the options of the arithmetic operator block's drop-down field, plus the block itself).
- It sets up some central label computation for all fields, though more thought is needed on whether this is sufficient for custom fields outside of core Blockly and on how to properly contextualize labels for field values. Core Blockly's fields are fairly simple for representing values which is why that aspect of #9301 didn't need to be solved in this PR. Note that the field labeling here is being used to improve all of the fields above, but also it tries to aggressively fall back to the _next best_ label to be used (though it's possible to run out of options which is why fields still need contextually-specific fallbacks).
### Reason for Changes
Generally the initial approach for implementing labels is leveraging as specific ARIA roles as exist to directly represent the element. This PR is completing that work for all of core Blockly's built-in fields, and laying some of the groundwork for generalizing this support for custom fields.
Having specific roles does potentially introduce inconsistencies across screen readers (though should improve consistency across sites for a single screen reader), and expectations for behaviors (like shortcuts) that may need to be ignored or only partially supported (#9313 is discussing this).
### Test Coverage
Only manual testing has been completed since this is experimental work.
Video demonstrating most of the changes:
[Screen recording 2025-10-01 4.05.35 PM.webm](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/c7961caa-eae0-4585-8fd9-87d7cbe65988)
### Documentation
N/A -- Experimental work.
### Additional Information
This has only been tested on ChromeVox.
## The basics
- [x] I [validated my changes](https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/contribute/core#making_and_verifying_a_change)
## The details
### Resolves
Fixes#9386
Fixes part of #9293
### Proposed Changes
Addresses #9386 through a number of changes:
- Ensures the flyout contents are reevaluated for ARIA changes whenever they themselves change (since previously `WorkspaceSvg` only recomputed its ARIA properties when one of its blocks self-registered which doesn't account for labels or buttons).
- Collapsible categories are now correctly wrapped by a group (since groups of tree items must be in a parent group).
- Updates toolbox ARIA computations to be on content changes rather than having items self-specify recomputing the ARIA properties. This mitigates an issue with collapsible categories not updating the toolbox contents and thus being omitted.
- Introduced a separate pathway for computing tree info for flyout workspaces (vs. for the main workspace) in order to account for `FlyoutButton`s.
- Updated `FlyoutButton` to use a nested structure of `treeitem` then `button` in order to actually count correctly in the tree and still be an interactive button. The readout experience is actually better now on ChromeVox, as well, since it reads out _both_ 'Button' and 'Tree item' which is interesting. It seems screen readers are designed to look for this pattern but it only works if set up in a very particular way.
### Reason for Changes
Most of the changes here fixed incidental problems noticed while trying to address #9386 (such as the variables category not correctly accounting for the 'Create variable' button in the count, or not having the correct labels). Much of the count issues in the original issue were caused by a combination of missing some flyout items, and trying to compute the labels too early (i.e. before the categories were fully populated).
### Test Coverage
Since this is an experimental change, no new tests were added.
### Documentation
No documentation changes are directly needed here.
### Additional Information
None.
* fix: improve screenreader output for workspace comments
* fix: run npm run messages to fully add new message
* fix: remove useless bubble label
* fix: use roledescription instead of description
* refactor: Make focusable elements responsible for scrolling themselves into bounds.
* chore: Add tests for scrolling focused elements into view.
* fix: Removed inadvertent `.only`.
* fix: Scroll parent block of connections into bounds on focus.
* fix: Fix bug that caused inadvertent scrolling when the `WidgetDiv` was shown.
* chore: Add test to verify that displaying the context menu does not scroll the page.
* chore: Clarify comments.
* fix: Remove errant `.only`.
* chore: Add test to verify that actively focusing a node does not scroll the page.
* fix: Remove inadvertent `.only`.
* fix: Fix positioning of pasted blocks in RTL.
* fix: Clean up after temporarily making the workspace RTL.
* fix: Remove .only.
* fix: Fix positioning of pasted comments in RTL.
* fix: Fix positioning of text preview on collapsed comments in RTL.
## The basics
- [x] I [validated my changes](https://developers.google.com/blockly/guides/contribute/core#making_and_verifying_a_change)
## The details
### Resolves
Fixes part of #8207
Fixes part of #3370
### Proposed Changes
This introduces initial broad ARIA integration in order to enable at least basic screen reader support when using keyboard navigation.
Largely this involves introducing ARIA roles and labels in a bunch of places, sometimes done in a way to override normal built-in behaviors of the accessibility node tree in order to get a richer first-class output for Blockly (such as for blocks and workspaces).
### Reason for Changes
ARIA is the fundamental basis for configuring how focusable nodes in Blockly are represented to the user when using a screen reader. As such, all focusable nodes requires labels and roles in order to correctly communicate their contexts.
The specific approach taken in this PR is to simply add labels and roles to all nodes where obvious with some extra work done for `WorkspaceSvg` and `BlockSvg` in order to represent blocks as a tree (since that seems to be the best fitting ARIA role per those available: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/Reference/Roles). The custom work specifically for blocks includes:
- Overriding the role description to be 'block' rather than 'tree item' (which is the default).
- Overriding the position, level, and number of sibling counts since those are normally determined based on the DOM tree and blocks are not laid out in the tree the same way they are visually or logically (so these computations were incorrect). This is also the reason for a bunch of extra computation logic being introduced.
One note on some of the labels being nonsensical (e.g. 'DoNotOverride?'): this was done intentionally to try and ensure _all_ focusable nodes (that can be focused) have labels, even when the specifics of what that label should be aren't yet clear. More components had these temporary labels until testing revealed how exactly they would behave from a screen reader perspective (at which point their roles and labels were updated as needed). The temporary labels act as an indicator when navigating through the UI, and some of the nodes can't easily be reached (for reasons) and thus may never actually need a label. More work is needed in understanding both what components need labels and what those labels should be, but that will be done beyond this PR.
### Test Coverage
No tests are added to this as it's experimental and not a final implementation.
The keyboard navigation tests are failing due to a visibility expansion of `connectionCandidate` in `BlockDragStrategy`. There's no way to avoid this breakage, unfortunately. Instead, this PR will be merged and then https://github.com/google/blockly-keyboard-experimentation/pull/684 will be finalized and merged to fix it. There's some additional work that will happen both in that branch and in a later PR in core Blockly to integrate the two experimentation branches as part of #9283 so that CI passes correctly for both branches.
### Documentation
No documentation is needed at this time.
### Additional Information
This work is experimental and is meant to serve two purposes:
- Provide a foundation for testing and iterating the core screen reader experience in Blockly.
- Provide a reference point for designing a long-term solution that accounts for all requirements collected during user testing.
This code should never be merged into `develop` as it stands. Instead, it will be redesigned with maintainability, testing, and correctness in mind at a future date (see https://github.com/google/blockly-keyboard-experimentation/discussions/673).
