Closed Bug 54500 Opened 24 years ago Closed 24 years ago

Tab through currently visible links/controls only

Categories

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect, P3)

defect

Tracking

()

VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 23914

People

(Reporter: webmaster, Assigned: lake)

References

()

Details

At present tabbing is strictly sequential. This is bad for people who use a 
keyboard to navigate. Instead, tabbing should be contextual.

To illustrate.

Go to the specified URL (http://www.w3.org/TR). Without using the mouse, 
navigate to the User interface for CSS3 proposal.

What should happen:
press page down a few times until URL is on screen
press tab a few times; the first tab should the first URL on screen, the second 
tab, etc.

What does happen:
press tab - tabbing starts at beginning of document meaning tab must be pressed 
hundreds of times.

Why this sucks:
if you are reading a page say 10 screenfulls down the document, you clearly 
don't want to visit a link you can't even see at the beginning of the document

In addition, it means that Mozilla is currently useless if you can't or don't 
like using a pointing device
lake, not sure if this is yours --could you reassign if needed? thx.
Assignee: don → lake
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Very good idea, that. Lynx works in a similar way.
OS: Windows 2000 → All
Hardware: PC → All
Summary: Tabbing should be contextual (tab tabs) → Tab through currently visible links/controls only
Actually "tabbing" for links separate from Form items, tabbing with a numeric 
modifier to jump a specified number of items and preserving page view, were in 
the plan for 6.0 but they got cut. At the moment they are having difficulty just 
getting regular tab to work right. Tab currently is having trouble working for 
the simple case of  source order. Tab order can be specified by the Author in 
HTML. But I hope that eventully we get to the place where tab will begin at the 
part of the source defined by the page view. This seems to be what you are 
asking.  An alternate suggestion I had from a blind user was to have the cursor 
location move with the page up and page down. I'm not sure how this would work. 

I am not sure who to assign this to. May be Don knows. Adding Don.
Yeah, tabbing is kinda wanked now.  Since this is an election year, I'll promise
that we'll fix this stuff in the next major release. :-)  Actually, we really
need to gather all the bugs together on tabbing and figure out what the exact
behavior should be.
I gota list of what it was, what people want, and a partial on how we can do it
but I need engineering input.
Lake, hmmmm ... is it possible to setup a meeting with me, German, Gable, and
publish the time on the net so mozilla folks can call in, and we can work it out?

Or do you want to send around a straw document with your data and we can start
adding to it?
Sounds Good to me. I'll pick this back up RTM.
lake, pls do include me on whichever doc review/net mtg you might plan for this
issue. thx!
...and me too
Hey, I'm working on it. :-)  Seriously, John Gable are gonna try and figure out
this meeting thang next week provided getting beta 3 and rtm don't distract us
too much.
See also the section dealing with (modifier+)Tab in
<http://critique.net.nz/project/mozilla/general/interface/keys/>.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 23914 ***
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 24 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
mass verification of duplicate bugs: to find all bugspam pertaining to this, set
your search string to "DuplicateBugsBelongInZahadum".

if you think this particular bug is *not* a duplicate, please provide a
compelling reason, as well as check a recent *trunk* build (on the appropriate
platform[s]), before reopening.
Status: RESOLVED → VERIFIED
Component: Keyboard: Navigation → User events and focus handling
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