1307520 - textarea cannot be resized using the keyboard

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, defect)

Description

[steve faulkner]

the HTML textarea element can be resized using the mouse, but i cannot find any way to do the same with the keyboard.

test page: https://thepaciellogroup.github.io/AT-browser-tests/test-files/textarea.html

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Sounds like WONTFIX to me.

What keyboard shortcut would you suggest?

Comment 2

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Let's see if someone can come up with a reasonable keyboard Ux before wontfixing this.

Comment 3

[steve faulkner]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #1)
> Sounds like WONTFIX to me.
> 
> What keyboard shortcut would you suggest?

one method would be to make the handle focusable and once focused allow the arrow keys to resize the text area.

An implementation of this method is available for a resizable dialog custom widget:
http://hanshillen.github.io/jqtest/#goto_dialog

Comment 4

[David MacDonald]

I agree that this needs fixing ... it's a basic issue and yes, allowing a tab stop on the corner and allowing arrow keys to resize from there is the probably the option.

Comment 5

[Fabian]

Alternatively we might consider a context menu option Resize which puts focus on the handle. This is how Windows makes window resizing possible (with the alt+space shortcut on a non-maximized window).
 
A possible downside of putting handles in the tab order is that it might break a common usage pattern of typing -> tab -> Enter to confirm a form by keyboard, which assumes the button after the form is the first one in the tab order. I don't have hard data, but the number of people using forms this way (which has been possible as long as forms exist) might be a lot higher than the subset that might want to resize textareas.

Comment 6

[Carolyn MacLeod]

Agree that the resize handle shouldn't be in the tab order. Context menu resize might be a good way to go (does FF implement Shift+F10 on Mac?)

Another possibility to consider is this (ancient) "Hack #34" https://books.google.ca/books?id=KWRE2C_S4YsC&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112&dq=resize+textarea+using+keyboard

which expands the currently focused textarea vertically with ctrl+enter and horizontally with ctrl+space.

Alternatively, this guy rewrote the hack to use ctrl+enter and ctrl+shift+enter.
https://lifehacker.com/resize-any-firefox-text-area-with-textarea-resize-greas-238973

Comment 7

[steve faulkner]

I do not understand why this hasn't been fixed? here is a demo of a method to do so https://codepen.io/stevef/pen/GReXYKy

Comment 8

[Sebastian Zartner [:sebo]]

I guess the main issue is still what UI(s) to use. Using the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + arrow keys as you chose it in your Codepen conflicts with the feature to jump between words (at least under Windows, maybe also under other OS's).

Sebastian

Comment 9

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Thank you for the demo, :steve!

Another consideration I have, besides what :sebastian shared above, is that there's nothing that would be announced by a screen reader in the demo. This may be confusing for sighted screen reader users, especially if they pressed the key combination while trying to do something else (i.e. a novice screen reader user trying to remember a key combo to, say, exit forms mode).

Maybe we could use something like aria-description with instructions (which may become verbose) but I would not know what role/announcement could be done. I.e. window splitter, slider/range patterns rely on a separate focusable element. Any ideas are welcome!