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[FEATURE]: announce the active turn status to screen readers in the web UI #57512
Description
Describe the enhancement you want to request
- I have verified this feature I'm about to request hasn't been suggested before.
When the web UI is streaming an assistant response, a screen reader hears "Working" and then nothing. The streamed text, reasoning and tool steps are not announced while the turn runs. I use NVDA on Windows, so this is what it looks like in practice: the turn starts, "Working" is announced once, and then the transcript is silent until the turn ends, at which point the text becomes readable if I go looking for it.
Three separate things cause this:
-
packages/session-ui/src/timeline/session-timeline-row.tsx:905putsaria-hiddenon the assistant content of the active turn, so it is not in the accessibility tree at all. That is tracked in bug(session-ui): V2 still hides streaming assistant content from screen readers #54652, with a fix open in fix(session-ui): expose streaming assistant steps #51084. -
There is no live region in the transcript. The only
role="status"is the "Working" chip atpackages/app/src/session/timeline/message-timeline.tsx:411, and it cannot announce either. It sits inside a<Show>, so the region is created along with its text, and the text is inaria-hiddenspans fromTextShimmer, which leaves the live region with empty text. It is also the only thing I hear, which is why "Working" is the entire experience. -
That chip is rendered either as the timeline's bottom spacer or as a row inside the virtualized list, so it gets re-created as the turn progresses and can be unmounted by the virtualizer.
What I would like is one polite live region, mounted with the session and outside the virtualized rows, that announces the turn status as it changes: "Thinking", "Running commands", "Searching the codebase", "Making edits", "Delegating work", and so on.
The ui.sessionTurn.status.* strings in packages/ui/src/i18n/en.ts already cover most of these and are already translated in every locale, but only ui.sessionTurn.status.thinking is used anywhere.
I would keep this to the status rather than the text itself. The guidance in packages/session-ui/src/storybook/current-session-fixtures.ts:789 says to use a status role for concise progress updates and to avoid putting the complete streaming transcript in one live region.
Activity
opencode-agent commentedon Oct 20, 2026
Thanks for the detailed write-up, @pranam-s! You're asking for a single polite live region in the web UI. It would be mounted with the session, outside the virtualized timeline rows, and announce the active turn's status as it changes ("Thinking", "Running commands", "Making edits", and so on). It would reuse the existing, already-translated
ui.sessionTurn.status.*strings and announce only the status, not the streamed text.I checked the points you raised against
dev, and they match. The only transcript status region is the "Working" chip inmessage-timeline.tsx. It is created inside a<Show>together with its content, that content comes fromTextShimmer, and nothing outside the translation files uses theui.sessionTurn.status.*strings yet. The maintainers will consider this.Related:
aria-hiddenon the active turn's content, which keeps it from being browsed while the turn runspranam-s commentedon Oct 21, 2026
I have a draft implementation at #57520 for anyone who wants to try it. I am holding it as a draft because it changes user-visible wording and adds a live region, and I would rather have a maintainer's call on the two questions below first.
1. The wording. The phase names come from the existing
ui.sessionTurn.status.*strings inpackages/ui/src/i18n/en.ts("Thinking", "Running commands", "Searching the codebase", "Making edits", "Delegating work", "Searching the web", "Exploring"), which are already translated in every locale. Two new ones are needed: "Responding" while the answer is streaming, and "Waiting for your response" when a question or permission is pending.2. The set of phases. A tool call is announced by its kind, a read is "Exploring", and the fallback reuses the existing "Working" wording. Should a tool that has moved to the background keep announcing, or should the status go quiet once work is in the background?
One thing I deliberately did not do: announce the transcript itself. The guidance in
packages/session-ui/src/storybook/current-session-fixtures.ts:789says to use a status role for concise progress updates and to avoid putting the complete streaming transcript in one live region.