Improve support for infinite scroll on the web

[bhavyashah]

Steps to reproduce:

1 Open your web browser. 2 Visit www.facebook.com and ensure that you are logged in. 3 Press Ctrl+End, then press shift+h, and note the post that is read. 4 Press Ctrl+End again followed by shift+h again.

Actual behavior:

A completely different post is read out. This is because probably because Facebook assumes that I hav finished reading up to the last post and therefore shows several more posts on my feed. I think this is the concept of infinite scroll wherein a website simply loads more, usually older or lower ranked, content when it ascertains that the user has gone through the existing content.

Expected behavior:

NVDA could have reported something in the interin to indicate that more contents had been loaded on the page. I am unable to presently think of phrasing that is user-friendly as well as concise, so I would invite comment on that.

Impact

• I suspect infinite scroll is a part of very many websites and can be commonly seen on the Internet. Facebook.com itself has a huge user base. I think Twitter employs this too. I know Wordpress users can toggle infinite scroll for their blogging sites. Apart from social networks, it makes sense for e-commerce sites to use this too.
• The status quo of not explicitly indicating infinite scroll is (a) genuinely confusing, and (b) this disorientation is unique to a visually impaired user. On (a), any person not navigating in an orderly fashion, i.e. going only from the top of a page to its bottom, but rather jumping to different sections of the website, would get thoroughly perplexed by the changing contents near the bottom of the page. Such non-linear navigation is common because people want to skip large chunks of a website and get to what they're looking for quickly. While sighted (or formerly sighted and low vision) and advanced users of NVDA may be familiar with infinite scroll, any other NVDA user - and this would likely be an overwhelming majority - would attribute this to NVDA's jumpiness. On (b), this is unique to a screen reader user as a sighted user would trigger infinite scroll only when they are at the bottom of the page and would thus see the newly loaded contents newly appearing right in front of them. Given that infinite scroll is prevalent on the Internet and truly disorienting for an NVDA user, this issue has a considerable impact.

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

Installed

NVDA version:

2020.2 Beta 1

Windows version:

8.1

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue:

Firefox 78.0.1, Brave browser 83.1.10.97

Other information about your system:

Other questions

Does the issue still occur after restarting your computer?

Yes

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.

No other version tested

If addons are disabled, is your problem still occuring?

Yes

Did you try to run the COM registry fixing tool in NVDA menu / tools?

No

[zahra21]

Hello Bhavya. i confirm the issue which you reported regardless of web browser name, version, nvda version etc. however, i disabled auto scrolling in firefox preferences and still have this issue. what should i do? i dont have facebook account, but i observed this issue always on quora.com and i think the behaviour is the same in any dynamic web page and social media websites.