645343 - Text input usability issues

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Widget: Android, defect)

Description

[CoJaBo]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; DROIDX Build/VZW) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 480X854 motorola DROIDX
Build Identifier: latest 4.0 from market (couldn't figure out how to copy text from about page in Firefox)

Text input usability issues
This was tested with Droid X (Froyo) using the Swype keyboard (some issues remain without Swype)
Most of these apply to single-line inputs, but some issues impair use of multi-line ones as well-
The cursor navigation/home/end/select buttons in Swype don't work. It is not possible to select text  (thus no copying and pasteing) or quickly jump to home or end. Selecting text by touch or double tap does not appear to work either.
It is not possible to touch and hold to scroll sideways in text inputs (especially long ones, e.g., Address bar) like native ones (compare with Android browser). This works correctly when scrolling vertically in multi-line inputs.
When moving with arrow keys in Swype, text doesn't scroll to follow the cursor, so if input doesn't fit in the box there's no way to see the rest.
Most of these alone are pretty trivial, but combined they make it extremely tedious to edit text in single-line inputs, requiring the user to hit left or right keys many many times, and no means at all to select text to copy/paste/move it.
Ability to select text on pages also appears to be absent.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Naoki Hirata :nhirata (please use needinfo instead of cc)]

Hi CoJaBo,

I don't seem to see any cusor navigation/home/end/select buttons in Swype.  How
did you get those options to appear?

Comment 2

[CoJaBo]

Drag from Swype button to SYM to open the cursor keyboard, forgot to include that in the report.

Comment 3

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Confirmed with my G2 w/ Swype

Comment 4

[CoJaBo]

Most of the issues no longer present as described. This can be closed, as I'll file separate bugs for them if they recur.
See also Bug 706336 and Bug 705201.
(Significant graphics corruption occurs when testing this, so its currently difficult to see if the other issues remain)

Comment 5

[alanomaly]

Here's what I'm seeing in Firefox 19 (latest beta):

1. "cursor navigation/home/end/select buttons": Page up / Page down work, everything else behaves as tap left / tap right. More in Bug 706336.
2. "It is not possible to select text [including] by touch or double tap": Individual words are incorrectly selected when tapped once (see Bug 755909 - can't see any syntax guide on how to make that into a link). Long press > Select word selects a word, but often the wrong characters (especially when input is 3+ lines in length). The dragging cursors don't work - the selection usually gets lost completely when they are moved, or, it jumps erratically.
3. "[No] touch and hold to scroll sideways in [long] text inputs": Still true.
4. "When moving with arrow keys in Swype, text doesn't scroll to follow the cursor": This one, and only this one, appears to have been fully fixed.

So sub-issues 1, 2 and 3 still remain. Issue 3 isn't in any other bug report that I can see, and issue 2 is only mentioned in passing (by me) in a related but not identical bug report (Bug 755909). 

If this is closed, then either bug reports should be created for 2 and 3 (unless they do exist but I couldn't find them), and should be linked to here. Bad text support with Swype in Firefox is something of a deal-breaker for Swype users.

Comment 6

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Jim, can you detail the Swype situation above?

Comment 7

[(inactive) Jim Chen [:jchen] [:darchons]]

(In reply to Aaron Train [:aaronmt] from comment #6)
> Jim, can you detail the Swype situation above?

The first point is a bug in IME code, and cpeterson or I can work on it.

I think the second and third points are bugs in text selection, which should be much improved in Nightly.

Comment 8

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

(In reply to Jim Chen [:jchen :nchen] from comment #7)
> (In reply to Aaron Train [:aaronmt] from comment #6)
> > Jim, can you detail the Swype situation above?
> 
> The first point is a bug in IME code, and cpeterson or I can work on it.
> 
> I think the second and third points are bugs in text selection, which should
> be much improved in Nightly.

Correct. CoJaBo, could you try the latest Nightly to see if the text selection/cursor issues you're referring to are fixed?

Comment 9

[CoJaBo]

Text selection and home/end Burtons don't work at all in the latest nightly.

Comment 10

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

(In reply to CoJaBo from comment #9)
> Text selection and home/end Burtons don't work at all in the latest nightly.

Can you give an example of a page that doesn't work with text selection? Do you have selection issues in text input fields, in the actual page text, or both?

Comment 11

[CoJaBo]

Text selection using the selection keys in Swype, in text inputs.

Comment 12

[(inactive) Jim Chen [:jchen] [:darchons]]

(In reply to CoJaBo from comment #11)
> Text selection using the selection keys in Swype, in text inputs.

Sorry for the confusion. When we said "text selection" we meant selecting text using touch, as described in point 2 of comment #5

The "Select text" function in Swype is described in point 1 of comment #5. This issue is being worked on in Bug 706336.

Comment 13

[alanomaly]

And to clarify, I'm mainly referring to text in input elements on the page (HTML Input and Textarea fields), where the problem is really bad. 

It's a bit flakey in regular html text (divs, paragraphs) too, but that's not the big problem.

Comment 14

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

can we get a more descriptive bug title?

Comment 15

[Brad Lassey [:blassey] (use needinfo?)]

Closing this bug out because it doesn't describe any specific issue.