Bugzilla

Thanks John for collecting the related bugs here (so far I had tried to cross-link them, but this is better!). I tend to agree with that, especially for message-related shortcuts. This represents a general issue of ux-error-prevention even for users with accessibility issues. Holding down a keyboard shortcut results in uncontrolled repetition of the same action, which for many scenarios won't be really useful, and should not be supported as a modus operandi, apart from causing the accessibility issues which you mentioned. Although I'd suspect that the accessibility problems might be better solved at OS level by changing the respective accessibility settings (I've seen those to be very elaborate on Win10). I.e. if you're *always* holding down keys for too long, maybe better to change your general OS keyboard settings to wait longer before accepting a key.

We might even be able to change this at a single spot somewhere in the toolkit implementation for XUL <key> which still handles most of our keyboard shortcuts. Per-command might be a lot more work, but we might want to start with some of the harmful commands at least.

We should be careful not to interfere with some of our shortcuts which rely on long keypress, like holding down BACKSPACE or DEL in an empty recipient row in composition to delete it.

Also, for smaller editing keyboard shortcuts (like holding Backspace to remove multiple or all recipients in composition), I think repetition is acceptable and useful (your text editor behaves the same).

Thanks John for collecting the related bugs here (so far I had tried to cross-link them, but this is better!). I tend to agree with that, especially for message-related shortcuts. This represents a general issue of ux-error-prevention even for users without accessibility issues. Holding down a keyboard shortcut results in uncontrolled repetition of the same action, which for many scenarios won't be really useful, and should not be supported as a modus operandi, apart from causing the accessibility issues which you mentioned. Although I'd suspect that the accessibility problems might be better solved at OS level by changing the respective accessibility settings (I've seen those to be very elaborate on Win10). I.e. if you're *always* holding down keys for too long, maybe better to change your general OS keyboard settings to wait longer before accepting a key.

We might even be able to change this at a single spot somewhere in the toolkit implementation for XUL <key> which still handles most of our keyboard shortcuts. Per-command might be a lot more work, but we might want to start with some of the harmful commands at least.

We should be careful not to interfere with some of our shortcuts which rely on long keypress, like holding down BACKSPACE or DEL in an empty recipient row in composition to delete it.

Also, for smaller editing keyboard shortcuts (like holding Backspace to remove multiple or all recipients in composition), I think repetition is acceptable and useful (your text editor behaves the same).