Right now type ahead find does not find text in button labels or in alt/title for images. It would be really useful if it did. When a match was found in an image that is a link, the tooltip would pop up, and the part of the tooltip that matches would be highlighted, just like the selection is. It would make this easier if these 2 bugs were fixed: bug 97223 - show tooltips as user tabs around bug 25537 - alt tags not shown as tooltips
I think it'd be cool if link typeaheadfind would just highlight the image link based on the alt text. This would work particularly well for those sites that use links that are images with text in them, assuming they have similar alt text. I hope that bug 25537 is always wontfix. Alt text is almost never appropriate as a title tooltip (and vice versus). I can see the point that it might be somewhat mysterious to have an image match for no apparent reason. Perhaps in this one particular case it would make sense to show the alt text as something like a tooltip. I'd suggest something more distinctive than a tooltip, such as temporarily replacing the image with the alt text with the match highlighted, or constructing a tooltip-like box aligned with the image's top and left position that shows the alt text. Having a distinctive box would make it clearer that it isn't the title being displayed. Note that images and buttons aren't the only items that need this time of match: a similar thing applies to matching alt text in image maps (area tag), objects, and applets.
Do you have any examples where the alt text makes a poor tooltip, because they did not intend it to be a tooltip?
This also could be useful for form fields, using the name/id of it. The focus should be placed on the field when it is used.
That won't work, because the name/id of formfields are often nonsensical to the end user. A lot of people would be confused if the seach went to a form field and some garbage popped up. The <label> element is what's used to tie text to form fields.
What about having a little tooltip-like label with the alt-name, or a number above every image with a link, form field and buttons, that is always shown? I have seen that be done for all links too in a voice navigation system for IE (from philips I think), and it wasn't that annoying. At least there should be a nubmered label on the imagelinks that doesn't have a alt or label-tag (and I think there are many of them on popular sites).
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Created attachment 104512 [details] First cut on zaplet to turn buttons into typeaheadfinable anchors (posting as per suggestion by aaron. quoting from mail sent to him:) {using typeaheadfind to search button text} anyways, i found one sneaky way around this problem: create a zaplet that (a) hides the buttons, and (b) creates anchors hrefs that simply click the hidden buttons as their 'onclick' action. now, all you need to do is map a keystroke to this zaplet, and presto! you can use typeaheadfind to click these buttons through the newly created anchors! (know of a good way to do this? i just gave up and made that zaplet my homepage, and mapped f8 to 'browser:home') the attached zaplet works for *named* forms etc. still need to work on unnamed forms. just remove the whitespace (including newlines) and make the javascript your homepage. inspired by the excellent zaplets at: http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/ this works like a charm on yahoo!mail. reading mail, f8, type 'delete', press enter... shwwweeeet :-)
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I'm agnostic about the issues discussed with alt tags, but I think there would be no drawbacks to having type-ahead find work with simple, text-labelled buttons (highlighting the text appropriately in that case would be nice.)
I would really like to be able to rotate through input elements such as buttons as well using typeahead find. Maybe an optional modifier could be used in order to achieve this, like the slash modifier for plaintext within the document.
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I almost submitted a dup on this. I have an app that writes javascripted anchors (like those generated by Amit's zaplet), but I want to move to using buttons instead, in part for reasons of accessibility. I've barely begun and I already miss the easy keyboard navigation. I can search for any text, but there are more spurious matches, and matches on buttons don't cause the button to get focus. I think it's most important to deal with text buttons, in part because it seems straightforward compared to image inputs. If a design for image inputs can be agreed upon and implemented without dragging the process out, that would be fine, but it would be a pity to slow the introduction of a usability enhancement that benefits sites with accessible designs in order to accommodate sites with less accessible designs. (Yes, I'm asserting that image buttons decrease accessibility.) This may be a slippery slope. One could make the case that what's really needed is navigation to any element that has a text label and a notion of activation/focus. I think this would include all labeled inputs, selects, etc, as well as anchors and buttons. I don't have an opinion as to whether this is a good idea; I mention it for completeness.
This is not a trivial bug to fix. I won't have time for this in the forseeable future.
See also bug 234363, "Find skips alt text (of broken images)".
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Internet Explorer 5 for Mac already does this for alt text in image, but apparently not for form elements.
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Users waiting for this to be fixed might want to have a look at the Hit-a-hint (http://hah.mozdev.org/) extension. It allows selecting in addition to links, also buttons, images and other elements by keyboard.
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In case this ever gets implemented: it should ignore the image alt for links with images *and* textual content. i.e.: <a href="#"><img src="icon.png" alt="icon"/>some text</a> /* ignore img */ <a href="#"><img src="navbar_links.png" alt="links"/></a> /* good */ This might not be so critical to users with the startlinksonly option set to false.
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Given the number of dups, this is arguably a desired feature. And it would greatly benefit users with visual impairments. I realize that the focus right now is on the upcoming release, but after the FF3 dust settles, any chance that this could be bumped up in priority for the minor release that follows? Thanks in advance for the consideration!!
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Seems like they'll have to wait till the dust settles on FF4 soon... heh.
Can still see this in Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101207 Firefox/4.0b8pre and Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101205 Firefox/4.0b8pre SeaMonkey/2.1b2pre => Moving to Toolkit
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