462367 - Accessibility programs seem to be unable to consistently manipulate text fields (ex: address bar)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Disability Access, defect)

Description

[nospam4mepls]

User-Agent:       Opera/9.61 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.1.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092510 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.3

I was trying to manipulate firefox using LDTP and discovered that I was unable to set the text in firefox' various text inputs. I also used the accerciser program to test text input and noticed that it was a bit buggy.

When using ldtp, I tried to do something like:

settextvalue ('*Firefox', 'txtLocation', 'http://www.mozilla.com')

Instead of inserting 'http://www.mozilla.com' into the address bar, the address bar text was simply erased.

When using the accerciser program to manipulate the text in the address bar, I noticed that sometimes my input would be detected and inserted, but at other times it wouldn't.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install ldtp
2.Start firefox (note the text in the address bar)
3.Invoke the python interpreter
4.Execute the following python statements
5.from ldtp import *
6.settextvalue ('*Firefox', 'txtLocation', 'http://www.mozilla.com')
7.Notice that the text in the address bar has been erased
8.Manipulate the address bar text usin accerciser
Actual Results:  
When attempting to set the text using ldtp, all text was removed from the text input fields. When manipulating the text using accerciser, my text was often not inserted into the address bar.

Expected Results:  
The accessibility features in firefox should allow users to input text into text input fields using the mechanisms described above.

I believe this was working at some point in firefox 3 because I found quite a few automated test cases online for firefox that make use of ldtp.

Comment 1

[Javier Collado]

Hello,

I have exactly the same problem. I used also the AT-SPI accerciser console to make sure that the problem wasn't in LDTP and got the same error:
> txt = acc.queryEditableText()
> txt.getText(0,-1)
'http://start.ubuntu.com/9.04/'
> txt.setTextContents('http://wwww.mozilla.org')
True
> txt.getText(0,-1)
''

My configuration is Ubuntu 9.04 and Firefox 3.0.8. If you need some other information to reproduce the bug, please let me know.

Best regards,
    Javier

Comment 2

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Confirming bug, see comment #1.

Comment 3

[Javier Collado]

Hello,

I've seen that the bug hasn't been assigned to anybody yet. As I said in my previous comment, I'm willing to provide any help to reproduce the problem.

Best regards,
    Javier

Comment 4

[alexander :surkov (:asurkov)]

Currently I'm afraid to fix bugs like these until we have automated tests for text interface (see bug 452769). The progress on automated tests bug is kept by ATK documentation conflicts. Once we resolve them with the help of Gnome team we'll resume the work on our bugs I think.

Comment 5

[Javier Collado]

Thanks for your comment Alexander.