audio player accessibility

[tmakarios]

Describe the bug
Screen reader users can't play audio.

To Reproduce
Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Use a screen reader and keyboard to go to the play button on an audio file in a chat, such as at https://freespoken.nz/bible-radio/
2. Press Enter
3. Discover that the play button is unavailable.

Expected behavior
The audio file should play.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• Desktop or Mobile? Windows 11 with NVDA, or JAWS
• Browser [e.g. Chrome, Firefox] Not sure
• Converse.js version [e.g. 4.2.0] 10.1.7, I think

Additional context
You can see the comments of the person who actually tested it in the replies to this toot https://theres.life/@TMakarios/112278231413032952

[unwaivering]

I'm actually one of the screen reader users who did the testing. I can confirm that this is the problem I'm having when using the web interface.

[unwaivering]

I've tried this in Firefox, and I was able to read the audio player controls. I've tried using the carrot browsing in NVDA, and it made the navigation much better. However while using the carrot browsing, it did not play. It did play without it. Perhaps you may want to test conversant JS to see if it complies with WCAG standards. you could do so by going here.
https://webaim.org/resources/evalquickref/

[jcbrand]

Converse doesn't do anything fancy with audio/video, it uses the built-in HTML audio and video elements.

The issue seems to be that browsers don't support accessibility features for these built-in elements. 🙄

This article has more info:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Accessibility/Multimedia

Looks like the workaround is to create a custom interface.

[Karankhatik]

Hey, i want to work on this issue. Please assign it to me. Thanks.

[jcbrand]

@Karankhatik Thank you for offering to work on this. There is a $100 bounty for whoever provides a solution for it (see here: #2481).

However, we don't assign tickets to people, because often they ask for this and then disappear.

Also, while only the person who resolves the issue gets the bounty, we don't restrict who is able to try and resolve it. If multiple people want to try in parallel, then they can.

If you want to work on this ticket, you can start by creating a pull request and mention this ticket in your PR.