Orca on GNOME 50 (Wayland) only reads element labels, not text content — plus automatic language switching not working

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On GNOME 50 / Ubuntu, Wayland session, Orca only announces element roles/labels (e.g. ‘button 25’) when navigating — both in Firefox and in Electron-based apps (e.g. Claude Desktop) — instead of reading the actual text content. It behaves as if stuck in Focus Mode. I set the Orca keyboard layout to ‘Laptop’ and the modifier to ‘Caps Lock, Shift_Lock’, and tried toggling Browse/Focus mode with Caps Lock+A, but nothing seems to switch.

Separately, I’m using two different speech synthesizers (Piper for Danish, RHVoice for English) and was hoping GNOME 50’s new automatic language-switching feature would pick the right voice per language, but it doesn’t seem to switch — Danish text gets read with an English voice/accent. As a side note I want to add that I’m a new Ubuntu user - normally using Mac OS. Any pointers on either issue would help.

All the best from Denmark

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Hello and welcome to the gnome forums.

Automatic language switching introduced in orca 50 can only switch languages with currently loaded speech engine. So for example if you have multiple piper voices you can take advantage of that.

For the next version orca 51 currently in RC stage, automatic language switching has improved greatly by introducing so called voice sets where you can configure preffered engine / voices considered for automatic language switching your-self.

As for your other issue where it’s not possible to switch orca into browse mode on the web, are you getting any feedback when pressing orca+a or are you getting nothing?

If switching can’t be performed orca should report “not in a document”.

Also can you try enabling so called learn mode by pressing orca+h, then pressing orca+a to find out if keyboard commands are working correctly? To exit out of learn mode you can press the escape key.

Also pressing orca+a twice forces the focus mode, pressing orca+a three times forces browse mode in case you are inadvertently locked in the focus mode. By using orca+a again you can unlock it into your prefered mode.

Finally if nothing of this is helpfull as a last resort you might try restarting orca, meaning turning it off by pressing alt+super+s, then waiting a few seconds and turning it back on by pressing alt+super+s again. The super key is just a different name for the windows key.

Also some applications such as web browsers tend to detect if a screen / accessibility support is enabled on launch. So it’s best to make sure the screen reader is already running before launching the web browser or your electron based app for choice.

If nothing of this is still helping then I am not sure but some older versions of chromium and electron have issues detecting accessibility is running. In such a case, can you try starting your browser or electron app from gnome-terminal or alt+f2 run box manually by adding these command line parameters:

--force-renderer-accessibility --enable-caret-browsing

So that might become

chromium --force-renderer-accessibility --enable-caret-browsing

Hopefully some of this is helpfull to you.

Greetings

Peter

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If nothing works for the browse mode (especially I’d hope Firefox should), generating a debug log might be needed to move further.