1194528 - Access keys appear not to work in settings (about:preferences) because they require content accesskey modifiers (ie alt-shift instead of alt-, on Windows, ctrl-alt instead of ctrl on macOS)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect, P3)

Description

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

STR:
- Open preferences
- Use, for example, the alt-v shortcut (Linux here)

Expected Result:
- Jumping to the "Save files to" field

Actual Result:
- "View" menu opened.

Even shortcuts without (obvious) conflicts with the menu bar or other things don't do anything.

Comment 1

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Ian Zimmerman tells me this works with Alt+shift+letter, which I can confirm, but shift wasn't required in the previous preferences dialog.

Comment 2

[[e-mail]]

pref("ui.key.chromeAccess", 4); // Alt
pref("ui.key.contentAccess", 5); // Alt+Shift

(or Ctrl and Ctrl+Alt on the Mac)

Comment 5

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (privacy/fingerprinting team)]

Sounds like this is still a problem in current versions from the duplicate bug 1336141. I will mention the workaround in the duplicate.

Comment 9

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 5 duplicates.
:jaws, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 10

[:Gijs (away/busy until Mar 10)]

It's not particularly clear how to fix this in a way that wouldn't be confusing, because the in-content shortcuts could conflict with parent browser window ones (e.g. alt-t, alt-f, alt-v, alt-e, alt-s and alt-h are all unavailable on English windows/linux). It's also unclear that this is still a pressing issue with the functioning search box.

Comment 11

[JT Hundley]

I'd say it is still an issue since the settings window still shows underlined characters. It advertises this well-known accessibility feature but it doesn't actually work the way that everyone expects it to. The only reason I know that I have to hit ctrl-shift-char is because of this bug tracker. I would have never guessed that on my own since there is no indication that I have to do anything different.

Comment 12

[:Gijs (away/busy until Mar 10)]

(In reply to JT Hundley from comment #11)

I'd say it is still an issue since the settings window still shows underlined characters.

So to be clear, I don't disagree - if I thought this wasn't an issue I would have closed the report entirely. My point was specifically that it wasn't pressing - ie not a "stop everything, must fix this immediately" issue, because various workarounds exist, and I would argue more people know how to use that searchbox than know how to use access keys.

I'm open to good ideas - I'm just honestly not sure what we should do here. Removing the accesskeys altogether would be a loss of functionality, but I suppose would solve some of the confusion... Not showing the access keys underlined like this but keeping the functionality would be band-aidy at best and confusing for users who accidentally press the right key combinations at worst.

It would be pretty confusing to most users to try to show a message telling them how to use these keys (and anyway that's not a "real" fix, it only works around the crux of the issue - "this software is confusing, let's try to un-confuse you").

And "just" using the "normal" access key modifiers isn't a straightforward solution either (neither technically nor in terms of ease of use - it would perhaps also cause significant localization churn as I expect we'd want localizers to re-evaluate the access keys they've specified so far).

So it's not clear to me how to move forward here.

Comment 13

[JT Hundley]

Agreed 100%. The best thing to do of course would be to make regular alt-char accelerator keys work in that menu, but it sounds like that's much more difficult than it sounds.

Comment 14

[Michal Čaplygin [:myf]]

Consider updating the the title so this issue is better searchable: I nearly submitted new dupe "No alt-key accesskey accelerator works in about:preferences" (I hope these keywords will help).

(And +1 (voted), obviously; seeing underlined letters in labels and not being able to Alt+them is frustrating. Glad I've learned about the …+Shift workafix.)