1589863 - The website/URL header for an RSS feed item in the headers pane of the message preview pane is not reachable via keyboard

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Disability Access, defect, P1)

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 with RSS subscription(s), which contains 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 (e.g. "Author", "Subject", etc.) in the message preview pane.

Actual results:

The "Website" header (and more specifically - its active link) is not reachable via keyboard navigation (e.g. TAB or Shift+TAB). That makes it very hard (if not impossible) for screen reader/keyboard only users to open the web page associated with the selected RSS news.

Expected results:

The "Website" header (and more specifically - its active link) should be reachable via keyboard navigation (e.g. TAB or Shift+TAB). Pressing ENTER or spacebar on it should open the URL/link in the default web browser.

Comment 1

[Jorg K (CEST = GMT+2)]

Alex and Jean-Philippe, there's more.

Comment 2

[Alex ARNAUD]

Redirecting the question to Patrick, one the blind user of Hypra that uses RSS in Thunderbird.

Best regards.

Comment 3

[Jean-Philippe MENGUAL]

Thanks Alex. Lets wait for Patrick's feedback, personally I dont use the feature at all. Neither the display pane, nor the rss. I could test the other pane display bugs, as I just needed to enable it, but rss... nice if Patrick can test.

Regards

Comment 4

[Patrick ZAJDA]

Confirmed with Thunderbird 68.1.2 using Orca on Debian Stretch.

Comment 5

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Not sure if it's here or not, but potentially a good place to start looking: https://searchfox.org/comm-central/rev/45acec6df8379eb964d7a57f83c02dd97f588364/mail/base/content/mail3PaneWindowCommands.js#1459

Comment 6

[Khushil Mistry [:khushil324]]

Attachment: Bug-1589863_website-url-msg-header-tabindex-0.patch

Comment 7

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 9155999 [details] [diff] [review]
Bug-1589863_website-url-msg-header-tabindex-0.patch

Review of attachment 9155999 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Looks good, r=mkmelin

::: mail/base/content/mailWidgets.js
@@ +73,5 @@
>            openUILink(encodeURI(event.target.textContent), event);
>          }
>        });
> +      this.addEventListener("keypress", event => {
> +        if (event.keyCode == KeyEvent.DOM_VK_RETURN) {

keyCode is deprecated, please just use
event.key == "Enter"

Comment 8

[Khushil Mistry [:khushil324]]

Attachment: Bug-1589863_website-url-msg-header-tabindex-1.patch

Comment 9

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/d093e0441f06
Make mail-urlfield CE is reachable via keyboard. r=mkmelin

Comment 10

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 9156583 [details] [diff] [review]
Bug-1589863_website-url-msg-header-tabindex-1.patch

Accessibility improvement, not risky.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9156583 [details] [diff] [review]
Bug-1589863_website-url-msg-header-tabindex-1.patch

Approved for beta

Comment 12

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Thunderbird 78.0b2:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/ff65eea9ddd5