304497 - RSS not accessible

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, defect, P3)

Description

[Aaron Leventhal]

There is no way to get the RSS view of a page with the keyboard.

There is no indication to screen reader users that an RSS view exists for a page.

Comment 1

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

A context menu item would do.

Comment 2

[Aaron Leventhal]

Okay, maybe a context menu item would be okay, but how does a screen reader user
know to look there? You're not going to check the context menu for every page
you visit.

Comment 3

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Did we have anything useful for live bookmarks upon now? (The old statusbar
element)?

Comment 4

[Aaron Leventhal]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Did we have anything useful for live bookmarks upon now? (The old statusbar
> element)?

No, it slipped by my notice earlier.

Comment 5

[Aaron Leventhal]

Anyone have a suggestion on this one, other than a context menu entry?

Comment 6

[Asaf Romano (gone)]

Beltzner had some in Bug 303848 comment 40.

Comment 7

[Mike Schroepfer]

Per Bug Meeting 8/16 Can we implement suggestion #2 in <a
href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303848#c40">303848c40</a> -
i.e. add a Feeds/RSS tab to the page info.   

Comment 8

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

I think that Aaron and I were happier with the first solution mentioned in bug
303848 comment 40, specifically adding the RSS icon to the TAB key sequence.
While this sol'n has the drawback of breaking muscle memory for users who are
accustomed to using Ctrl+L, tab to get to the search bar, those users a) form a
small subset of the overall user base and b) should be using Ctrl+K to get there
directly anyway.

Comment 9

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

So, after much discussion, the tab sequence isn't practical, for the same reason
that we can't focus the searchbar icon, we can't focus these.

What we're proposing is to add this to the Bookmarks menu, like so:

[Bookmarks]
___________________________
|Bookmark this Page...    |
|Add as Live Bookmark...  |
|Bookmark All Tabs...     |
|Manage Bookmarks         |
|-------------------------|

[Bookmarks]
___________________________
|Bookmark this Page...    |________________________
|Add as Live Bookmark    >| Mozilla Announcements |
|Bookmark All Tabs...     | Mozilla Weblogs       |
|Manage Bookmarks         |------------------------
|-------------------------|

Will get on this once the feedview backout is done.

Comment 10

[Aaron Leventhal]

Just playing devil's advocate here. Just because a users wants to view the RSS
feed directly does that necessarily mean they want to bookmark it? If that's the
case, then why doesn't the RSS button in the URL bar go straight to a bookmark
options popup menu. Why did we do all the work of having making the feed
viewable as content?

Comment 11

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

(Feedview was backed out in bug 305134)

Couple of suggestions/nits ..:
 - "Add Live Bookmark..." (drop the "as")
 - the flyout text should be "Add &feedName;..."

so ..:

[Bookmarks]
___________________________
|Bookmark this Page...    |
|Add Live Bookmark...     |
|Bookmark All Tabs...     |
|Manage Bookmarks         |
|-------------------------|

[Bookmarks]
___________________________
|Bookmark this Page...    |______________________________
|Add Live Bookmark       >| Add Mozilla Announcements... |
|Bookmark All Tabs...     | Add Mozilla Weblogs...       |
|Manage Bookmarks         |------------------------------
|-------------------------|

Comment 12

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Note that bug 251447 has some healthy discussion about how to get the best "feed
name" from a feed, although I don't think any of those should block release, and
am happy with the simplest case of using:

  - the "title" attribute from the <link rel> tag for cases where we need to
    differentiate between multiple feeds on a page

  - a combination of "page title - title attribute" for the default Live Bookmark
    name (as mentioned in bug 305799)

Comment 13

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Attachment: first cut

Comment 14

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Attachment: patch

Minimal impact on l10n, the wording in the multiple-feed submenu isn't ideal,
but it's sharing code with the menupopup for the URL bar button.  Could fix
that as a followup, but that's a bit more code and more l10n work.

This is well-tested and should be safe for branch once it has review.

Comment 15

[Vladimir Vukicevic [:vlad] [:vladv] (needinfo me, slow to respond)]

Comment on attachment 194075 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Bleh, I still think that having this "Add Live Bookmark" menuitem right there
is going to be very confusing to any user that doesn't know exactly what a live
bookmark is.  When confronted with "Bookmark this page" and "Add Live
Bookmark", what are they going to choose?    "Live Bookmark" certainly sounds
better, but it won't be enabled on the majority of pages out there.  I guess
they have to add a dead bookmark then?	However, I don't have a better
solution. =/

r=vladimir, with UI grumbling..

Comment 16

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

fwiw, I agree almost completely (almost!), but we didn't have time to come up
with a more ideal solution. For future, I'd really like to sit and talk with you
about bookmarks, rss / live bookmarks, and ways we can synthesize these various
things to simplify the story to our users.

Comment 17

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Comment on attachment 194075 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Vlad suggests we just add a keyboard shortcut to bring up the menu from the
live bookmarks icon in the addressbar. that would be much lower impact and
since we don't have "the right" solution here, I think that'd be a better way
to go as well.

Comment 18

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Let's take a step back and examine the whole RSS UI.  The menuitem, with the
exception of being visible when there's no feeds, is the same what we have in
the URL bar, down to the tooltip and label being identical.  If that UI is ok,
the menuitem is ok, but if its not, then the menuitem sucking is a paralell of
our sucky RSS UI.  If "Add Live Bookmark..." is going to confuse users, then we
already fail that user with the current UI (and the UI for 1.0).

For 2.0 we need to rethink how we present feeds to the user, but right now we're
not at that point.  Its not the time, or the point in the cycle, where we
rethink a whole chunk of UI.

As for the keyboard shortcut to trigger the submenu/dialog instead of adding a
menuitem, that has some other problems.
1) Requires the URL bar be present.
2) Not at all discoverable (Help is only useful in this case if the user divines
that its signalling something and manages to guess right.)
3) This is pretty much a toolbar icon, whether its included inside of another
element, its a separate feature from the action of the address bar, and ergo not
having a menuitem probably violates all of the HIGs that require menu items to
be available for each toolbar item.  (Last time I looked this up, it was
Windows, Mac, and GNOME.)

Comment 19

[Mike Schroepfer]

Minusing this for now for beta1/beta2.   We should re-examine when we have more
time to determine the ideal solution.

Comment 20

[Chris Beard]

I understand that we can declare that this is not an accessible feature and
still achieve sec508 certification.

Comment 21

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Well, then that's what we should do, since the alternative solutions at this
time (Page Info, adding it into the tabkey-focus order) are all similarly
unpalettable.

I suppose this another one to add to my growing list of "let's investigate this
a little bit to see what people expect." In the meantime, if we can get away
with *just* the URL bar icon and still be s.508 compliant, I think that's the
best choice UI-wise for the beta releases.

(note: Regarding Vlad's UI grumblings, while I understand that it's entirely
possible that a user might find the idea of a "Live Bookmark" more palettable
than a regular ol' bookmark, I'm not convinced that's a bad thing. After all,
"Live Bookmarks" are much more useful in many cases. This is an area for much
heated debate, I'd wager!)

Comment 22

[Hari Kumar G]

a related one - 306882.

> As i understand currently the Feedview icon in the status bar has been removed
> (?)(for Firefox 1.5).  This leaves a user with only one option of using the
> subscribe to feed button in the location bar for adding one Live Bookmark to his
> bookmarks list.  Mostly I use Firefox with no toolbars to conserve space and
> view more and uses keyboard for most of the navigation.  That leaves me with no
> option to easily add such a feed to bookmark.  As far as I think there is no
> other way.
> 

There is no option for a user to know that a page contains live feeds, which
could be bookmarked.  So the feedview icon in the status bar is one good
alternative to indicate this.  Along with this a menu item Feeds...<expanding to
 available live feeds on the page> under the 'View' menu (?)

The individual links from the feed(s) should be expanded the way it is done with
any live bookmark under Bookmarks menu, so that they are independently viewable.
 The last item of the feeds could be 'Add as Live Bookmark...'

[View]
___________________________
|.........................|_____________________ _____________________
|RSS Feeds               >| Feed 1             >|Item 1              | 
|.........................| Feed 2             >|Item 2              |
|.........................|---------------------|Item 3              |
|-------------------------|                     |--------------------|
                                                |Add as Live Bookmark|
                                                ----------------------

Similar behaviour should be shown by the Feedview icon of URL Bar.

Comment 23

[Aaron Leventhal]

Mconnor says we should target this one for Firefox 1.5.1

Comment 24

[Carl Menezes]

(In reply to comment #23)
> Mconnor says we should target this one for Firefox 1.5.1
> 

Suggestion:

Maybe an entry in the "View" menu? 
Example:
"View" > ...
         Page Source Ctrl+U
         Page RSS     
         Full Screen F11

After all, isn't the bug about getting the RSS View of the page instead of subscribing to the RSS feed?

Comment 25

[Matthew van Eerde]

Not sure I like the solution in comment #22 because it involves requesting all the feed links to be able to show the items.

#24 I like better - but perhaps a submenu?

View >
   Page Source Ctrl+U
   RSS Feed(s) >
      Page Title - Link Title 1
      Page Title - Link Title 2
      ...
   Full Screen F11

Bookmarks >
   Bookmark This Page...
   Bookmark This (These) RSS Feed(s) >
      Page Title - Link Title 1
      Page Title - Link Title 2
      ...
   Bookmark All Tabs...

Comment 26

[Matthew van Eerde]

Perhaps
   Bookmark (An) RSS Feed >
would be more accurate than
   Bookmark This (These) RSS Feed(s) >

since the user can only bookmark a single feed at a time.

Comment 27

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

(In reply to comment #24)
> "View" > ...
>          Page Source Ctrl+U
>          Page RSS     
>          Full Screen F11

View isn't really an appropriate place for this, as RSS isn't neccessarily an alternate view of the content, nor is RSS a function that changes the way the browser presents itself to the user.

This bug might end up getting swallowed up by the work being done on "Places" (see: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places) which is tracked by bug 317841.

Comment 28

[Håkan Waara]

Is the current Places UI accessible? If not, would it be easier to fix than with the old bookmarks stuff (as discussed in this bug) ?

Comment 29

[Mark Pilgrim (inactive)]

I believe this bug is on hold until the Places UI stabilizes, and then we're going to fix it in Places.

Comment 30

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

If this bug is places only, it shouldn't target fx2b1, right?

Comment 31

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Its not places-only.

Comment 32

[Mark Pilgrim (inactive)]

Attachment: patch for 1.8 branch

Implement menu item in Bookmarks menu called "Subscribe To This Page" (MOZ_FEEDS) or "Add Live Bookmark" (!MOZ_FEEDS).  If page has multiple feeds, menu item will expand to show all choices, just like clicking the feed icon in the location bar.  Selecting a feed will show the feed view (MOZ_FEEDS) or add a live bookmark (!MOZ_FEEDS).

Comment 33

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

Comment on attachment 225720 [details] [diff] [review]
patch for 1.8 branch

Nit:

>+<!ENTITY subscribeToPageMenupopup.label "Subscribe To This Page">
>+<!ENTITY subscribeToPageMenuitem.label "Subscribe To This Page...">

If we have "Search in Bookmarks" below (with 'in' being lowercase), I think that the 'to' should be lowercase, also.

...
...
> <!ENTITY searchBookmarksCmd.label "Search in Bookmarks...">

Just my two cents.

Comment 34

[Mike Beltzner [:beltzner, not reading bugmail]]

Comment on attachment 225720 [details] [diff] [review]
patch for 1.8 branch

Right now I'm seeing what is a bug, and I can't tell if it's local to my tree (which I pulled a couple of days ago) or not, but I get both "Subscribe to This Page" and "Subscribe to This Page >" options with the former always disabled and the latter always enabled.

Anyway, Mark tells me the intended UI is to have one or the other based on the number of available feeds, so this gets ui-r+ :)

Comment 35

[Mark Pilgrim (inactive)]

Attachment: Use hidden instead of collapsed for Mac compatibility

Fixed beltzner's Mac issue by using the proper XUL attribute (hidden instead of collapsed) to hide the menu item we're not currently using.

Also fixed the capitalization of the word "to".

Comment 36

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Comment on attachment 225765 [details] [diff] [review]
Use hidden instead of collapsed for Mac compatibility

So, this looks good, though I think I wrote most of this, so I'm naturally biased!

Comment 37

[Mark Pilgrim (inactive)]

(In reply to comment #36)
> So, this looks good, though I think I wrote most of this, so I'm naturally
> biased!

Yup, you did.  I just updated the patch-rot and fixed a bug or two.

Comment 38

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Checked in, branch and trunk.

mozilla/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/browser.dtd 	1.25.2.20
mozilla/browser/base/content/browser.js 	1.479.2.150
mozilla/browser/base/content/browser-menubar.inc 	1.57.2.35

mozilla/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/browser.dtd 	1.48
mozilla/browser/base/content/browser.js 	1.644
mozilla/browser/base/content/browser-menubar.inc 	1.95

Comment 39

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1527381