android: the handoff — the pending rounds, the pipeline, and what is unverified

Everything written this session that has not been through the device: rounds 43
to 48 (each patch adversarially verified, 43's transient-notice expectation
fixed), a partial round 49, the pipeline scripts, the Android Auto design and
the icon comparison mock. Also the two harness changes that were never A/B'd —
adaptive waits, which may only shorten a declared wait and never lengthen it,
and a ship that runs the mock walk and the deploy at the same time. The A/B and
its 255-step baseline are in handoff/tools; main stays at what the phone has
actually walked.

handoff/rounds/ins-r28-doc.txt

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+## What a screen reader says
+
+Every control on the phone is named by what it does, in the app's own
+words, and where the desktop already has a word for something it is the
+word used here too — Seek, View album artwork, Close artwork viewer. An
+icon-only control carries an `aria-label`; one with visible text is named
+by the text it shows.
+
+The nav is a tab set: `role="tablist"` on the bar, `role="tab"` and
+`aria-selected` on the five destinations, and the count badge round
+seventeen added is part of the tab's own name — "You, 3 transfers",
+"Community, 2 unread" — rather than a digit read out before the word it
+belongs to. The badge itself is `aria-hidden`, because the number is in
+the name now.
+
+The two sheets are dialogs: `role="dialog" aria-modal="true"`, the player
+sheet named for what is playing, the half sheet reading its own first
+title back out of the DOM so that twenty-seven kinds of sheet need no list
+of names to keep in step. Opening one puts the focus somewhere sensible —
+the player sheet on its Close, the half sheet on its grab handle, which is
+a real button now ("Close this sheet") and the first dismissal a screen
+reader could ever reach; the scrim behind it never was one.
+
+A sheet that is down is `inert` and `aria-hidden`. Neither sheet is
+unmounted — they are translated off the bottom of the screen, and the half
+sheet deliberately keeps its last body rendered through the slide down —
+so before this the closed sheets' rows, the hidden mini bar and the nav
+under an open sheet were all still in the accessibility tree, and TalkBack
+could swipe into every one of them.
+
+There is one live region, `.sr-live`, mounted for the life of the app and
+clipped to a single pixel, because a region that appears with its words
+already inside it is announced reliably by nobody; an announcement here is
+a change of text in a node that was always there. That is what carries an
+error and a notice, so an Undo offer is actually read out — and the Undo
+button itself stays reachable, only the sentence beside it is hidden from
+the tree so it is not said twice.
+
+Artwork that opens the viewer is a control, not decoration. Artwork that
+is decoration carries `alt=""` and every icon is `aria-hidden`, so the
+tree never reads a filename out. The waveform is `role="slider"` with a
+value and arrow keys where it can seek, and `aria-hidden` on the mini bar
+where it is only a picture of the position. Switches say on or off, choice
+chips say pressed, and the two long descriptions and the gap line say
+expanded.
+
+The check, so this does not quietly rot: the walk's probe sweeps every
+interactive element in the live DOM and counts four things — the ones with
+no accessible name (`a11yAnon`, with `a11yWho` naming the first three
+offenders so one run tells you what to add), the ones whose name is junk
+(`a11yBad`: bare digits, a filename, a lone glyph, an essay), the ones
+sitting in a layer that is off-screen but still in the tree (`a11yGhost`)
+and the ones that look chosen without saying so (`a11yState`). All four
+are asserted at zero on Home, the library, a record, a catalog record, the
+artist page, You, the taste page, a half sheet, the player sheet and the
+viewer — and the anonymous count on a room and on both shapes of prompt
+besides, because a room's message box and the prompt's own field are where
+the fields this round finally named actually live: assert it only where
+they are not and the round guards everything except its own work.
+
+One known exception, left alone on purpose: the per-row ⋯ is a
+`role="button"` inside the row's own `<button>`, and the mini bar's three
+transport buttons sit inside its `role="button"` the same way. That is
+invalid ARIA, and both ends are named so nothing is anonymous; unpicking
+it means splitting `.trk` (one flex row with a whole-row `:active`) and
+rewriting the walk's `.trk .r` selectors, for no gain a screen reader
+would notice.
+