654908 - Improve keyboard and screen reader accessibility of tbpl

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Tree Management Graveyard :: TBPL, defect)

Description

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Step one: keyboard.
Illustrative use case: using only the keyboard find your way to looking at the log for a particular orange, then go back and star it.

Step two: screen reader.
Illustrative use case: use Orca on Linux, or NVDA on Windows to do the use case above.

Quick ideas:
* when tabbing to one of the orange boxes, pressing enter should set focus to something in the area that appears at the bottom of the screen so that the keyboard user doesn't have to tab through the entire matrix of tests to get there.
* user WAI-ARIA, or other attributes to better name things
* improve the hierarchy of the tab ordering.

Note: The Filters functionality can be helpful already.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Should probably be a bullet item for "put the undiscoverable keyboard shortcuts in an invisible but read-by-screen-readers block, and stick a link to the documentation that doesn't exist in a menu."

If not for the fact that N and P are sort of broken, I'd approach case one with "U" to hide green and starred builds, then "N" to get to the first unstarred (where I could cheat and say I was there, except I was trying to get to the second one, and "N" and "P" were ignoring it and pretending that the first and third were the only ones), then cheat and use my knowledge that what I want is at the bottom, Cmd+L, Shift+Tab something like six times and I'm in the summary popup, where I'd a thousand times rather be than opening the log, which is something I only do in times of extreme desperation. Then I'm stuck, can't click a star icon with the keyboard, and while I can open the comment form with "C" tab focus won't go to the suggestions in the form to let me pick them there, either.

Comment 2

[Trevor Saunders (:tbsaunde)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Should probably be a bullet item for "put the undiscoverable keyboard shortcuts
> in an invisible but read-by-screen-readers block, and stick a link to the
> documentation that doesn't exist in a menu."

Ok thanks, that was all new to me and sounds useful.  Is any of this documented somewhere?  I didn't see much   useful on google.

(In reply to comment #0)
> 
> Quick ideas:
> * when tabbing to one of the orange boxes, pressing enter should set focus to
> something in the area that appears at the bottom of the screen so that the
> keyboard user doesn't have to tab through the entire matrix of tests to get
> there.

This makes a lot of sense to me, if that box is a link  I would think a user would expect it to cause focus to be moved to something useful.

> * user WAI-ARIA, or other attributes to better name things

Not sure what to improve the name of, but maybe I just don't know what all I can make tbpl do :)

> * improve the hierarchy of the tab ordering.
> 
> Note: The Filters functionality can be helpful already.

is this described somewhere?  I'm not aware of this or what it does.

Comment 3

[Liz Henry (:lizzard) (relman/hg->git project)]

Mauro, jeads, I'm cc-ing you to this so that you can think about building accessibility into tbpl2 aka treeherder from the beginning. :)  The comments should be useful!

Comment 4

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Wontfix since TBPL is being replaced by Treeherder.