Add accessible labels to message delivery status indicators - #7915
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heath-toby wants to merge 1 commit into
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Add accessible labels to message delivery status indicators#7915heath-toby wants to merge 1 commit into
heath-toby wants to merge 1 commit into
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The outgoing message status indicator (sending/sent/delivered/read/viewed/ paused) is rendered as an icon-only div with no text alternative, so screen reader users get no indication of a message's delivery state. Add role="img" and an aria-label derived from the status, so assistive technology announces "Sent" / "Delivered" / "Read" / "Viewed" alongside the timestamp, matching the information sighted users get from the icon. This is an accessibility-only change with no visual impact.
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First time contributor checklist:
Contributor checklist:
_locales/en/messages.json; it does not submit translated locales.)mainbranchpnpm run readyrun passes successfully (verified: prettier,check:types, oxlint, intl-linter, and icu-types generation all pass; the display-dependent Electron test step was not run locally)Description
The outgoing message delivery-status indicator (sending / sent / delivered / read / viewed / paused) is rendered as an icon-only
<div>with no text alternative. Sighted users can see at a glance whether a message was delivered or read; screen reader users get nothing — the element is unlabeled, so it is not even surfaced to the accessibility tree.This change adds
role="img"and anaria-label(derived from the existingstatusvalue via the message'si18n) to that indicator. Assistive technologies now announce "Sent" / "Delivered" / "Read" / "Viewed" alongside the timestamp, bringing Desktop to parity with how status is already conveyed on Signal mobile. It is an accessibility-only change with zero visual impact, and only applies to your own outgoing messages (the indicator is already outgoing-only).icu:MessageMetadata__status--{sending,sent,delivered,read,viewed}(thepausedstate reuses the existingicu:sendPaused).error/partial-sentare intentionally left unlabeled here because they are already surfaced as visible text elsewhere in the metadata.Transparency: the diff was drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and manually tested by me on a real device with a screen reader.
Test approach
role/aria-labelto the status indicator, then navigated my own sent messages with the Orca screen reader. Each message row now reads as content → timestamp → status (e.g. "…, 14:32, Read"). Verified the label updates live as a message transitionssent → delivered → read, and thatpausedreads as "Send paused".aria-labelis consumed by Chromium's accessibility engine, the same label is exposed through NSAccessibility (macOS/VoiceOver) and UI Automation (Windows/NVDA, JAWS, Narrator) with no platform-specific code.