458635 - Envelope tabbing in addresses makes unnecessary stops (star in header pane contacts shouldn't get separate focus using <tab>)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Following up bug 450724:

When you use Tab to advance to the message body, the focus moves into the envelope panel.  When it gets to an address, a focus indicator (dashed line) appears around the displayed name (or name+address or address-only, however it appears) -- but there is apparently no useable action.  Enter does nothing; Space acts as scroll/move-to-next; Ctrl+C doesn't copy the text.  Why are we here?

Tab again; we're on the Star icon.  Again, no keyboard response is possible.

Tab again; we're on the little Dropdown icon.  Again, no keyboard response is possible -- Enter doesn't even open the menu.

Three stops per address, and no action available.  And if the user is just trying to get to the message body (bug 382349), it's that much more frustration in trying to navigate.


Presumably there is at least one action intended for addresses.  I would say that opening the dropdown is the key one, since the Add To Address book option is in that menu, as is Copy Email Address.  I'd suggest having a single tabstop per address, with the available action being to open the menu.  Not sure what the best UI for this would be; treating the entire widget monolithically (xref bug 457012) is probably best.

Comment 1

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Hm. I think that the stops aren't unnecessary but that at least one action (opening a context menu, maybe) ought to be possible at each stop.

Strangely enough (and I know Sm is not Tb but...), in SeaMonkey 2.0a2pre when I tab through the envelope it stops at the Subject and the date (with the text selected; Ctrl+C copies it to the clipboard) but not at the From and To addresses. Then the whole body, then (if any) each link in turn. No stop at the twisty either.

Mike: can you please say (for the record) in which Thunderbird build you saw the bug (as shown near the bottom of the About => Thunderbird menu)?

Comment 2

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Oops -- I meant the Help => About Thunderbird menu.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I'm going to have to disagree with you, Tony: more than one tabstop per address is too many.

The version, for the record, was:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.9.1b1pre) 
Gecko/20081005 Shredder/3.0b1pre

Comment 4

[Tony Mechelynck [:tonymec]]

Thanks for the UA.

I believe that no stop at the From or To lines is too few; when there are several clickable addresses in e.g. the To line I wouldn't think that one stop at each of them would be too many but that's more debatable. But maybe I misunderstood you: I don't see what your "star" and "dropdown icon" refer to; but then, my newest Thunderbird version is 2.0.0.18pre.

In any case, taborder stops with no possible keyboard action other than tabbing to the next stop or back-tabbing to the previous stop seem superfluous to me, as they are (IIUC) to you.

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Tony, you'll need to look at some version of TB3 to see the effect.
Current trunk has reduced number of tab stops to 2 stops per contact: one on the "monolithical" contact with bubble ui including the star, the second stop with dotted focus indicator only on the star. Dropdown arrows are gone for good (bug 460602).

I posted  Bug 470659 to follow up on Mike's comment #0 -  Message reader: make focussed contacts actionable (pressing ENTER on contacts should open context menu, ctrl+c should copy full email address).

If the stop at the star should stay, it should also be actionable, like pressing enter on star would add/edit the contact. However, I tend to agree with Mike that one stop for the whole contact including star would be better to speed up keyboard usage. In support of this, consider that adding/editing a contact via the star are likely to occur far less frequent than other actions like copy/write to. Plus we are not even saving a keystroke whith two stops:
- With two stops, it's TAB (from bubble highlight to the star) and then press another key (like Enter) to act on the star. That's two keystrokes to get to star action (add/edit contact).
- With one stop, it's one key (like Enter) to open the actions menu, and one accelarator key (like b or e), still not more than two keystrokes to get to star action. But advancing from one contact to the next we are saving one keystroke each, which can be lot when it comes to mails with multiple addresses.
That's clearly in favour of having just one stop per contact.

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Enhanced summary.

This bug should be considered in the current drive to polish the new header pane.

We still have two focusable tab stops for each address in the header pane, and none of these stops is properly actionable (Bug 470659), apart from <context menu> key / Shift+F10. Try <tab>ing through a collapsed(!) list of say 20 contacts, that makes 40 stops, 20 of which do nothing at all, apart from making the surrounding elements bounce up and down within the header pane. As Mike Cowperthwaite points out in comment #0,

> having a single tabstop per address, with the available action being to open 
> the menu... is probably best.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

In the long run, I propose to shorten the <tab> sequence even further (cf. bug 511745, comment #2).

- use <tab> to move focus fast track between From, Subject, To, Date...
- within header fields that contain a list of contacts (like To, CC, BCC), use <cursor> keys to move focus from one contact to another

This is the typical OS behaviour for lists of objects, and other mail apps like Outlook do the same. This will also help us towards implementing a way of selecting multiple email addresses from header (with <shift> and <ctrl>).

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

should we just dupe this to one of those refined solutions?

Comment 9

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #8)

should we just dupe this to one of those refined solutions?

Well, while things got much better, the key problem remains: We still have large/unlimited number of tab stops for all recipients in the main sequence. We should eventually address this per my suggestion of comment 7:

In the long run, I propose to shorten the <tab> sequence even further

• use <tab> to move focus fast track between From, Subject, To, Date...
• within header fields that contain a list of contacts (like To, CC, BCC),
  use <cursor> keys to move focus from one contact to another

For which I've just filed a followup:
Bug 1799714 - Message header can have unlimited number of tab stops in recipient fields (To, CC, Bcc), which may seriously impede keyboard navigation (should follow ARIA grid pattern standards)

So we can close this bug as wfm on 102.4.2 (64-bit) per current summary.