141459 - Compose window: To: has no mnemonic

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Composition, enhancement)

Description

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.0+) Gecko/20020405
BuildID:    2002042914

In the compose window, there should be a fast way to access the list of
recipients, either by giving To: CC: etc. mnemonics or by putting a label
"Recipients:" with an accesskey above.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.File|New|Message
2.
3.

Actual Results:  No accesskey for To

Expected Results:  see above

Comment 1

[Jean-Francois Ducarroz]

reassign to varada

Comment 2

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

taking all of varada's bugs.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Some sort of key to get to the list from any of the other fields in the compose 
window would be good.  From, Subject and Attachments each have their own hotkey, 
and Ctrl-Tab works from any of the header fields to return focus to the message 
body.

Navigation of the list could be a little easier, as well.

See also Bug 144303.

Comment 4

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 5

[Serge Gautherie (:sgautherie)]

Filter on "Nobody_NScomTLD_20080620"

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Marco - does this affect accessibility?  i.e. is this a valid "access" issue as defined "related to making Mozilla accessible to users with disabilities and special needs"?  

And, long passage of time, so it's possible other changes have been made for accessibility

Comment 7

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

In Thunderbird, when in any of the fields, pressing Alt+R (on Windows) will focus the "From" combobox, and Alt+S will focus the "Subject:" field. There don't seem to be valid mnemonics for "To:", since T is taken by the "Tools" menu, and "o" is taken by the "Format" menu.

Moreover, there could be several "To:" or "CC:" fields depending on the number of recipients. So having a grouping that gets an access key and focuses on the first recipient, as suggested in comment #0, is definitely still a good idea. Although this will be interesting to put in visually, will change the layout quite a bit I guess. :-)

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #6)
> Marco - does this affect accessibility?  i.e. is this a valid "access" issue
> as defined "related to making Mozilla accessible to users with disabilities
> and special needs"?  

Agree with Wayne, this is not really an issue of disability access.

(In reply to Mike Cowperthwaite from comment #3)
> Some sort of key to get to the list from any of the other fields in the
> compose 
> window would be good.  From, Subject and Attachments each have their own
> hotkey, 
> and Ctrl-Tab works from any of the header fields to return focus to the
> message 
> body.

(In reply to Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) from comment #7)
> Moreover, there could be several "To:" or "CC:" fields depending on the
> number of recipients. So having a grouping that gets an access key and
> focuses on the first recipient, as suggested in comment #0, is definitely
> still a good idea. Although this will be interesting to put in visually,
> will change the layout quite a bit I guess. :-)

I agree with Mike and Marco that ideally there should be an access key for the recipients section of composition header pane, but as Marco already noticed, in the present design, I see no way of achieving this. We're not going to add a "Recipients:" label because it would be extremely odd and space-wasting in the current design. We can't add an access key for the recipients section to one of the recipient type dropdown entries as they are not permanent and can be changed.

This might eventually be addressed when we do Bug 440377 to have fixed single-line input fields allowing comma-separated addresses for each recipient type (To,CC,BCC). Then we can have access keys for each of the recipient types.

In the meantime, this is accessable via alt+r (to focus from:), then tab;
or just Ctrl+Tab until you're there.

Atm, there's nothing we can do here, short of redesigning the whole header per bug 440377.