335617 - Failed to browse the webpage in caret browsing mode.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 334626

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[Tim Miao]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050607 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050607 Firefox/1.0.4

This bug makes user fails to read the web content in caret browsing mode.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Launch firefox and load the page "http://www.sun.com/".
2. Press F7 to switch caret browsing mode on.
3. Press Left arrow to read the web content.

Actual Results:  
User could only browse part of web content with visible caret cursor. Lots of web content can not be accessed with caret cursor.

Expected Results:  
All the web content should be accessible to users in caret browsing mode.

This bug can be found in vermillion_39/snv_38.

Comment 1

[Aaron Leventhal]

Please mark these bugs as blocking caretnav.

Also, please create minimal testcases for caret nav bugs. You can do that by continually cutting the HTML in half until the bug doesn't happen anymore. That way you can discover what markup is causing the problem and file a more specific bug such as "A button followed by a textfield breaks caret nav". That will help the engineers a lot.

Finally, I don't think you should keep filing caret navigation bugs right now because we have enough. Orca & LSR are not going to rely on caret navigation anyway, and even if they were we have plenty of bugs to fix before giving it a second set of tests.

Comment 2

[Willie Walker]

Regarding Orca and/or LSR not relying on caret navigation: we agreed to give up on FF2 because of the nature of how caret navigation was implemented and that bugs were nearly impossible to fix.  But, I'd rather not close the door on caret navigation for FF3.  Having Firefox provide the smarts to navigate data more intelligently can simplify the code in the assistive technology and it can also benefit a larger number of users.  

For example, simple caret navigation for doing selection of text is useful to people with physical impairments or for those who don't use the mouse (I'm in that camp).  Structural navigation is also very useful for people who don't use the mouse - I know I find myself wanting something more efficient than page up/down and tab.  One thing I'd suggest is to try unplugging your mouse for a whole day.  Not just 5 minutes, but an entire day.  Try responding to bug reports using the keyboard alone.

If you're like me, you'll find that you wish you had some more efficient way to navigate complex content from the keyboard alone.

Comment 3

[Aaron Leventhal]

Will, I agree they should be fixed. That's not the point.

The question is:
1) Who will take the bugs?
2) When will they fix them?
3) How will we deal with regressions?
4) Do we need more bugs filed until we get some of the 30+ bugs that are already filed fixed? We can't tell which are dupes, especially when the bug reports are, caret browsing gets stuck in www.foo.com. If anything, we need QA to create minimal testcases, which means a tiny HTML file with only the elements/attribs needed to reproduce the problem. Then they should check for their own dupes. Don't leave the developers with a huge mess of bugs like, website a, b, c, d, e and f don't work with caretnav.

It's going to be very difficult to get review/superreview as well. No one who's active knows this code well or wants to deal with it.

If Sun wants to fix these bugs, then please take bug 241023, assign it to someone, and start fixing the bugs! No one will stop you, I'm just asking that QA & developers work together sensibly on this massive problem.

Comment 4

[Tim Miao]

Attachment: Test Page

Comment 5

[Tim Miao]

Hi Aaron, I posted one of our test pages of key-nav. Would you please look into it? I think it could cover lots of key-nav testings. If something is  missing, please free to correct me. Thanks!

Comment 6

[Willie Walker]

I definitely appreciate the diligence and concern here.  I also dearly understand the resource issues - we all live with them every day.  My comments were mainly a reaction to the statement "Orca & LSR are not going to rely on caret navigation".   We closed the door a bit on FF2 because of the way the caret implementation was done, but we certainly don't want to shut the door on compelling caret navigation for FF3.  Thanks!

Comment 7

[Uri Bernstein]

The issue with this page is that its entire text is within either floated elements, or absolutely-positioned elements (which are essentially the same as floats, as far as caret navigation is concerned).

I'm therefore making this a duplicate of bug 334626, which has some testcases for float issues.

As Aaron said in comment #3, bugs about specific websites are not useful. Bugs about specific issues (such as floats) are.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 334626 ***