1024363 - In Vietnamese Firefox, many menus and menu items have English accesskeys

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Mozilla Localizations :: vi / Vietnamese, defect)

Description

[Minh Nguyễn]

Attachment: Examples of incorrect accesskeys

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140608004002



Actual results:

In Vietnamese Firefox, many menus, menu items, and buttons have an extra letter in parentheses at the end of their labels. For example, the File menu is labeled "Tệp (f)".

Apparently these letters are visible because the localizers thought it necessary to keep the English accesskeys. But I'm using Firefox on the Mac, and Mac OS X doesn’t support accesskeys. These letters take up valuable space, are confusing, and mean nothing. Even on Windows, which does support accesskeys (aka mnemonics), an application is not supposed to display them until the user begins navigating with the keyboard (such as by pressing Alt):

<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/10/05/792913.aspx>


Expected results:

The Vietnamese localization should choose appropriate accesskeys for menu items and buttons. An accesskey should be one of the letters in the label, preferably the first letter of one of the words in the label. The purpose of an accesskey is to be more obvious and memorable than a keyboard shortcut. Users on Windows might have difficulty remembering that Alt+B opens the "Trang ưa thích" (Favorites) menu. (The same menu is called "Bookmarks" in English.) Because they are supposed to be intuitive, accesskeys are also supposed to be less visible than keyboard shortcuts in menus.

The following two links explain the rules for accesskeys in Mozilla-based applications:

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XUL_Accesskey_FAQ_and_Policies#How_do_I_pick_an_accesskey_letter.3F>
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL/Tutorial/Accesskey_display_rules>

They closely parallel the Windows accessibility guidelines:

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn742392.aspx#Access_keys>
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn742465.aspx#Access_keys>

"Because access keys aren't intended to be memorized, they are assigned to a character that is early in the label to make them easy to find."

The Vietnamese localization of Windows follows this guideline in all the built-in programs. Firefox’s Vietnamese localization looks unfinished by comparison because of this bug.

Localizers of Firefox extensions are encouraged to follow these guidelines too:

<http://babelwiki.babelzilla.org/index.php?title=Tutorials#Why_must_accesskeys.C2.A0_be_translated.3F>

Comment 2

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

As far as I can tell most accesskeys use a letter available in the label these days

There are still about ~20 external accesskeys in Firefox that might be worth looking into
https://transvision.mozfr.org/accesskeys/?locale=vi&repo=aurora