Some keyboard shortcuts are announced incorrectly by screen readers

[afercia]

See the various issues / PRs related to keyboard shortcuts, for example #9190 and #8316.

Some of the keyboard shortcuts displayed in the UI use non-alphanumeric keys like comma , or minus -. These characters are generally ignored by screen readers as they're considered "punctuation". Screen readers do have a "verbosity" setting to fine-tune the amount of punctuation that will be read out. However, with default settings some punctuation is just ignored.

For example, the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+, is announced as Control plus Shift plus. See below the NVDA speech viewer does show the comma, but it's not read out: it just makes the screen reader pause briefly:

VoiceOver with Safari is smart enough to read out the cloverleaf symbol as Command but still ignores the comma and the Shift+⌘, is announced as Shift plus Command:

Out of curiosity, I've checked what Google Docs does in these cases. Seems that shortcuts with comma, period, semicolon, are announced correctly:

Inspecting the source, turns out they just use an aria-label attribute to expand the shortcut to a screen-reader-understandable form:

They do that for all the shortcuts, even the ones that wouldn't need to be expanded (I guess to simplify things):

I'd recommend to implement the same solution, as communicating shortcuts in a way that's not understandable to users who benefit the most from them, defeats a bit the purpose of having shortcuts .

Note:
about the + sign used to separate the keys, I've read @jasmussen comment on #9190 (comment) and seen that, for macs, the + sign has been intentionally removed after the Command symbol, see 5b0b00b and following refactoring. However, I think there's a bit of inconsistency right now.

For the mac shortcuts, I understand the choice to not use symbols and always use key names except for ⌘ but I think it's a bit confusing visually, especially in some cases, see below:

I'd tend to think the smart argumentation behind the usage of the + when preceded by the cloverleaf symbol may potentially confuse users. On the other hand, I'd be in favor of not using the + at all for macs as @jasmussen suggested, and always use it on other OSes instead. Would it be possible to simplify a bit and just use a space as separator for macs and a plus for non-macs? For example:

• mac: Shift Option ⌘ M
• non-mac: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+M

[afercia]

About the plus vs. space, noticed @jasmussen used spaces in this mockup 🙂

#7297 (comment)

[afercia]

Note: also shortcut keys like Bksp should preferably be expanded to a better understandable word.