343636 - no keyboard navigation in mail-news folderpane - arrow keys do not work

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[K Chayka]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060606 SeaMonkey/1.5a
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060606 SeaMonkey/1.5a

Keyboard navigation using arrow keys in the folderpane stopped working after the June 6 nightly build. This makes mail-news unusable for us keyboard users. :(

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start mail-news

Actual Results:  
The folder for the default account is expanded, but the inbox is not higlighted by default. Arrow keys (any direction) have no effect.

Expected Results:  
The folder for the default account is expanded, the inbox is highlighted by default. Up/down arrow keys move vertically through the folders and left/right arrows expand or collapse folders.

Tab or F6 still moves the focus between the threadpane, message preview and folderpane. The arrow keys still seem to work OK in the threadpane and message preview pane.

Is this another side effect of the fix for bug 296040?

Comment 1

[K Chayka]

As of Win32 build 072108, the problem still exists, however I discovered that a mouse click within the folder pane starts keyboard navigation working like it should.

Without a mouse click in the folder pane first, there is no access via keyboard. That's still a big accessibility problem, dontcha think?

Comment 2

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Probably related: Bug 340867.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Confirm, arrow keys don't work, except that it will spring open and close an account, but can't select folders.

Karsten, do you see this on MAC?  If so, OS=ALL.


(In reply to comment #2)
> Probably related: Bug 340867.

i.e. bug 296040.  (conversely, Thunderbird keyboard function has not been affected, only inability to click in space)

Comment 4

[Karsten Düsterloh]

> Confirm, arrow keys don't work, except that it will spring open and close an
> account, but can't select folders.

On Mac, when I open mailnews, the folderpane does not have the focus, so - of course - I can't do any arrow key movement there. As soon as push focus to the folderpane (vial click or tab key), the arrow keys work as expected.

On Win2k, OTOH, I can confirm.

Comment 5

[[e-mail]]

Attachment: Proposed patch

This patch was lying around but I can't remember why I didn't attach it before.

Comment 6

[Karsten Düsterloh]

Comment on attachment 257968 [details] [diff] [review]
Proposed patch

>+    folderTree.view.selection.currentColumn = folderTree.columns.getKeyColumn();

While this fixes the selection problem in the folderpane, it does not fix the actual focus bug: the threadpane(!) used to have the focus after start-up. Your patch should do that, too.

r=me with that.

Comment 7

[[e-mail]]

Fix checked in.

Comment 8

[Karsten Düsterloh]

And what's the deal with the focus? Even though the threadpane has a selected item now, we still don't have keyboard navigation, because we no focused element in the UI...

Comment 9

[K Chayka]

Win32 trunk build 040408, W2K

The arrow keys seem to be working now, but very sluggishly. Looks like that's true for all cases of tree navigation, not just the mail-news folder pane. The prefs window category tree is just as bad.

I guess that's a different bug, right?

Comment 10

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

WFM and not sluggish.  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) Gecko/20080925002535 SeaMonkey/2.0a2pre

is there a bug filed on comment 8?

Comment 11

[K Chayka]

WFM, and has for a long time now.