1589862 - Action buttons in the message preview pane for a message not reachable via keyboard

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1816784

(Thunderbird :: Disability Access, defect, P3)

Description

[Kostadin Kolev]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:69.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/69.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Launch a screen reader like NVDA or Narrator.
2. Launch Thunderbird 68.
3. Make sure that the message preview pane is enabled.
4. Navigate to/select a folder containing a few messages.
5. Select a message from the list, so it appears in the message preview pane.
6. Use the TAB key to navigate between the controls in the headers pane.

Actual results:

The action buttons (e.g. "Reply", "Forward", "Reply to all", etc.) are not reachable via keyboard navigation (TAB or Shift+TAB).

Expected results:

The action buttons (e.g. "Reply", "Forward", "Reply to all", etc.) should be reachable via keyboard navigation (TAB or Shift+TAB) in the headers pane of the message preview pane.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Alex and Jean-Philippe, there's more and more.

Comment 2

[Jean-Philippe MENGUAL]

Hi,

We choosed, so far, to focus on regressions instead of improvements. This bug is confirmed, because the action buttons are never accessible (reading or writing a message). All the toolbar is not, actually.

On the other hand, while I wih they are in contexts such as the columns headings in the message list or calendar events list (to sort the messag, re-order the columns), I think the workaround is relatively easy for actions in message. The user has 3 options: keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-r, l, a, etc), the Message menu, and the context menu (shift-f10 or Menu key). So I am not sure working on this is mandatory as the user can do the actions with many othr workarounds. Tell us the impossible actions, it will be likely easier to implement a shortcut or a menu entry for them.

Regards

Comment 3

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Thanks again.

Comment 4

[Kostadin Kolev]

(In reply to Jean-Philippe MENGUAL from comment #2)

Hi,

We choosed, so far, to focus on regressions instead of improvements. This bug is confirmed, because the action buttons are never accessible (reading or writing a message). All the toolbar is not, actually.

On the other hand, while I wih they are in contexts such as the columns headings in the message list or calendar events list (to sort the messag, re-order the columns), I think the workaround is relatively easy for actions in message. The user has 3 options: keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-r, l, a, etc), the Message menu, and the context menu (shift-f10 or Menu key). So I am not sure working on this is mandatory as the user can do the actions with many othr workarounds. Tell us the impossible actions, it will be likely easier to implement a shortcut or a menu entry for them.

Regards

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, although I use the message pane in which those buttons are located, I don't use those action buttons. Normally I use the corresponding keyboard commands or the context menu. But I've decided to report it anyway, because I've noticed the bug while reproducing some other bugs.

So, this issue/bug could be determined as "low priority".

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Magnus do you agree with the priority? (and related bugs?)

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin] (away, back Aug 4)]

Seem not too bad, especially since - as mentioned - keyboard users are likely to pick up on the keyboard shortcuts for these actions and use those.

Comment 7

[Alessandro Castellani [:aleca]]

We're addressing this in bug 1816784, which doesn't rely on an HTML toolbar