Hello all,

I also have the status bar of Thunderbird showing in the program's main window and I don't observe the described behavior. But I'm reading messages from the main window of Thunderbird (via the message list and the message pane). Most screen reader users seam to read messages in a separate window. And we come to the main thing here - the option to show/hide the status bar in Thunderbird is independent for the separate Thunderbird windows like the main window, the optional separate window for message reading, the message composer window, etc. So, if you've disabled the status bar from within Thunderbird's main window, it will not affect its behavior for the message reading window and it will probably still be visible in it. And if you're reading messages from within that message reading window, this may be why you still hear those messages - the status bar is still shown for the message reading window.

Mind you, this automatic speaking of status bar messages should not be happening even with the status bar shown It was fixed for the main window of Thunderbird, but not for the other windows like the ones for message reading and for composing a message. This should be reported to and fixed by the Thunderbird developers. Has anyone done that? If not, I may do it these days. The only place that I find this automatic speaking of status bar messages useful is in the a"Advanced Search" window, where thanks to those messages I know the status of the performed search, without needing to manually read the status bar.

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Best wishes,
Kostadin Kolev

На 31.8.2020 г. в 22:07, Hope Williamson написа:

Yeah I have the same issue. It's pretty annoying. Especially when it
keeps saying downloading however many messages. I tried turning off the
status bar thing, and it still does it.