When does NVDA read out the word "document"?

[soehlerSF]

I'm an engineer working with a webpage that contains article, div, and header elements. I've begun noticing that when I focus on headers (especially from outside the webpage), NVDA will read aloud the header and then "document". So if the header says "KD", it will read out "KD document". Is there documentation that indicates when the word "document" gets read aloud?

[SaschaCowley]

Hi @soehlerSF,

To the best of my knowledge, NVDA will say "document" when focus first lands on or in a document, like a webpage.

Is this causing you or your team a problem, or were you just asking out of curiosity?

Thanks,
NV Access software developers

[soehlerSF]

Thanks very much @SaschaCowley. I noticed in our internal development that the NVDA appears to be announcing "document" when focus passes through <article> tags. I was just curious if that is something that is intended and/or documented. I don't see any problem with it explicitly, but was just hoping we could determine if this is understood behavior.

[soehlerSF]

@seanbudd @LeonarddeR continuing the conversation from here. I don't see any option in NVDA called "report articles". Can you please point me to it? This discussion may all be moot if this behavior can be toggled off.

Regarding the other questions (reproducible steps, etc), I could provide this but it would take some work to reproduce, as I'm only able to get it to reproduce in a specific setting in our SaaS and have been unable to get it to reproduce on test html websites. I have no idea why. These steps to reproduce would involve requesting a trial org from Salesforce, building a screenflow, and then manually replacing an html element with <article>. Our customer's encounter of this involves custom code that we are not at liberty to produce. But I have determined that in our specific setting, the presence of <article> is what is causing the readout.

If we want to go down the path of reproducibility, let me know and I can provide the steps. But to save us energy, let's chase down this "report articles" option first.

[soehlerSF]

Regarding spec violations, I don't think anything is violated here (though customer is pointing to WCAG criteria 1.3.1 Info and Relationships); I think we're just looking for an understanding of what causes 'document' to be read aloud. Removal of <article> in our reproduction causes NVDA to not read out 'document'. However blindly adding <article> in other situations and then focusing into it doesn't cause it to be read aloud either. There's some other aspect to it that is confusing for the customer; perhaps a function of attributes or exogenous configuration in the DOM.

[LeonarddeR]

The function to report articles can be found in the Document Formatting category.
That said, that option only triggers reporting of Article, not of Document.
I'm afraid there's not much else we can do without at least a HTML dump to reproduce the issue.

[soehlerSF]

@LeonarddeR I see there's a checkbox for multiple elements and it looks like one is Article (which is already deactivated). Thanks for the suggestion, but looks like this option doesn't change the outcome.
That said, I think since there is no way for us to provide reproducibility at the moment, I think we can declare this one out of our collective control and close this discussion. I appreciate your responses, and thanks for the timeliness. You guys take care!