36048 - Tracking bug: shortcuts need to work on non-US keyboards

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Internationalization, defect, P3)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Mozilla includes some keyboard shortcuts that do not work with keyboard layouts other 
than the U.S. layout or slight variations of it shuch as the U.K. layout. Ctrl-[ and Ctrl-] 
(Back & Forward) are such shortcuts.

In general safe shortcut take the form:
Ctrl-[Shift]-[Alt]-key

Where Ctrl is Command on Mac OS, Alt is Option on Mac OS and Shift and Alt are 
optional.
"key" should be one of these:
a-z
,
space
esc
tab
arrow keys
backspace

If the user can be expected to reach to the numeric keypad, "key" can be one of these, 
too:
0-9
=
/
*
-
+

(Note: even though Ctrl-/ is easy to type on the U.S. keyboard, it is particularly 
unergonomic to type on manyother keyboards.)

Those are the sortcuts that can be, in general, typed with keyboard layouts inteded for the 
Latin script.

It should be noted, that all typeable shortcuts aren't free for an application to use.
On Mac OS at least the following shortcuts are reserved for OS use:
Command-(any modifiers)-space
Command-tab
Command-Shift-tab
Command-Shift-(digit)

On Mac OS in locales with a script other than the Roman (ie. Western European, 
MacRoman charset) script the following shortcuts are reserved:
Command-left arrow
Command-right arrow

On Windows at least the following shortcuts are reserved:
Alt-tab
Alt-Shift-tab

On the Mac OS, Command-. is a safe shortcut (and has special meaning).

It is important to note that these shortcuts should be fixed in the en-US version and not in 
localizations, because the en-US version is used by people from around the world with 
different keyboards. Also, if they are fixed in the en-US version, there is no need to fix 
them further in localizations.

Comment 1

[Frank Tang]

reassign to UE group and cc related party.
Please forward this to ANY UI designer.
Please understand this is a problem with English build and L10N is not a
solution because people ALSO want to use English build on different keyboard
layout.

Comment 2

[rchen]

set it tot M17.

Comment 3

[shuang (gone)]

added two other UI designers to the cc list. Hope they can help German to get a 
solution if possible. However, i am not sure we can get there by M17 though. 
Thoughts?

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Is there a list of all keyboard shortcuts available somewhere? Something like
<http://critique.net.nz/project/mozilla/general/interface/keys/>? If so, Henri, 
Frank, et al. could go through it and find any shortcuts which weren't
l10n-friendly.

I think [e-mail] is working on a complete list of keyboard shortcuts. 
(For some reason, Bugzilla won't let me add [e-mail] to the CC list.)

Perhaps this bug should become a tracker for bugs about individual keyboard 
shortcuts.

Comment 5

[german]

marking nsbeta3 and updating milestone
Note that the specific issue of [ and ] is being discussed in bug 29941 and will 
be resolved there. But the description for this bug is very suitable to keep it 
open as localization verifier against the keyboard shortcuts.
Yes the menu spec needs to be updated on mozilla.org, but what Lake was working 
on is figuring out keyboard navigation inside documents and across documents and 
windows.
setting nsbeta3

Comment 6

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

Marking meta to make this one a tracker as Matthew suggested.

Comment 7

[hangas]

Marking nsbeta3- while assigned to German.

Comment 8

[german]

any update to NS6 keyboard shortcuts needs to be verified against this list!
Keeping open.

Comment 9

[Teruko Kobayashi]

Changed QA contact to [e-mail].

Comment 10

[german]

removing nsbeta1 kwd to avoid confusion since this was from Netscape 6.0. See
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility for more info on current
assignments. re-assigning bug to aaronl for review, since he is working on this
very thing right now.

Comment 11

[Aaron Leventhal]

Are there any shortcuts that are a problem now, or any shortcuts in the spec
German pointed to, that are problematic?

Comment 12

[Aaron Leventhal]

We don't appear to have any known problems at the moment.

Comment 13

[Roy Yokoyama]

ylong: can you verify this bug? 

Comment 14

[Yuying Long]

I tried some non-English keyboard short-cut, seems it works fine with me, but I 
can't try all of them.
Reporter: could you please specify some examples of problem on which 
language/OS? otherwise we might mark it as WorksForMe.

Comment 15

[Roy Yokoyama]

Changing to WORKSFORME. Please reopen this bug if someone disagrees.

Comment 16

[Yuying Long]

Mark it as verified.  We also have some bugs are talking about more specifical
which keyboard/OS.