88380 - + and - Keyboard accelerators inaccessible on international keyboards (larger/smaller font size)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

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

Description

[Tim Magnussen]

alt+[, alt+], alt+-, alt+= are used in the Composer for controlling the font and
paragraph properties. These keys cannot be accessed with eg. a danish keyboard
("[]" chars lies on AltGr+8/9). It would be very nice if there was a
non-dificult way to change the keyboard accelerators.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

-> aaron

Comment 2

[Kathleen :Brade]

This may be a duplicate bug...

Comment 3

[Aaron Leventhal]

Roy, what should I do with this one?

Comment 4

[Andreas Premstaller]

Same problem with a german keyboard on W2K.
I suggest Platform->all

Comment 5

[timeless]

[] are changing to tab/shift-tab iirc 

Comment 6

[Kathleen :Brade]

The keybindings with [ and ] are covered in bug #92284.
Unless this bug is intended to be a meta bug, we can have it cover the +/-
keybindings in Composer.

Aaron--if this isn't a meta bug, you can just assign this bug to me.

Comment 7

[Aaron Leventhal]

Ask and ye shall receive

Comment 8

[Charles Manske]

The + and - keys are used by Browser to increase and decrease the base font size,
correct? So doesn't the Browser also see this problem for that keybinding?
Composer uses the same keys because this is related action: increase,
decrease font size while editing.
I don't think this is a Composer issue. 

Comment 9

[Kathleen :Brade]

We have decided to remove these keybindings altogether in Composer unless a 
workable solution can be found.  

Navigator and Mail have these keybindings as well.  So we need to address this 
bug there (and anywhere else it may appear).

Would , and . work or do those cause problems on intl keyboards as well?
Control-9 and Control-0?

Comment 10

[Tim Magnussen]

',', '.' and '0', '9' would work on scandinavian keyboards I but don't know 
about the rest of the world. 
What about using <tab> / <shift-tab> for indenting / unindenting the selected 
text.

Comment 11

[Charles Manske]

See bug 98624 about using Tab key for indenting/outdenting.

Comment 12

[Kathleen :Brade]

This bug (in Composer) is for keybindings for larger/smaller font size.  Browser 
and Mail have similar functionality attached to the same keybindings.

Comment 13

[Kathleen :Brade]

Aaron, Jennifer--I need guidance on this bug.  I am planning to remove + and - as 
keybindings in Composer.  However, Navigator and Mail also have keybindings (and 
possibly other areas?).  Should we just remove the shortcut or should we provide 
an alternate keybinding (if so, what should they be?).

Aaron--Do we have a policy to not use these keybindings?

Jennifer--Should this bug cover all uses of + and - in keybindings or just 
Composer?  Do any specs need to be updated to not use these as accelerators or 
shortcuts?

Is there anyone else who should be consulted?

Comment 14

[Aaron Leventhal]

I recommend that we not remove the keybindings, but provide alternatives if it's
a very common function.

If it's not so common, and it's still accessible enough through the menus that
might be good enough for some things. Usually that means it's only a quick 2-3
keystrokes away instead of just 1. If people are only using that command once or
twice per hour, that's good enough. It's not worth using up important keys for
rare commands.

For the commands you are considering alternatives for, how many keystrokes does
it take to do the command without the accelerator? How often do you think the
command will be utilized?

Comment 15

[jglick]

I don't know the actual frequency #'s regarding usage, but I would guess these 
accelerators are pretty popular, especially when viewing web pages.

Comment 16

[gail]

As someone who is somewhat visually impaired, I can tell you that these are 
VERY important accelerator keys and use them all the time. You cannot expect 
users to rely on every web designer's whim for font sizes. 

Move them if you must, but please don't remove them.

Comment 17

[Kathleen :Brade]

Since these commands are high usage in both Composer and Navigator, we should 
probably have a keybinding on them.

Jennifer, Aaron:  Could you suggest some alternates we might use so that non-US 
keyboards can make use of these popular commands as well?  Could we use accel-
shift-, and accel-shift-. ?  I believe that those are i18n-friendly.  Are they 
already being used?  (Note: accel-. is reserved for "cancel" on Macintosh)

Comment 18

[Aaron Leventhal]

We're not going to remove these keystrokes, but we need alternatives for
keyboards that don't have them.

Since they're usable from the menus - a couple keystrokes instead of one, I
doubt they're popular enough to take away another set of possible accelerator
combos from the few we have left available. We're *desparately* short on key combos.

Again, since it's available with 3 keystrokes instead of 1 (Alt+V Z M and Alt+V
Z L), I don't think this is crucial. For users that need this all the time, once
that becomes part of their users muscle memory, it becomes like typing the word
"and". Very quick.

I would also imagine that intl 101 key keyboards have the + and - key on the
numpad. Can we make it also work with accel+numpadplus and accel+numpadminus?

Also, remember that as long as every keyboard has one set of accelerators
available, we're okay. 

For example, we could make accel+[ or ] redundant with + and -. Someone can
check to see if most/every keyboard layout that doesn't have +/- Has [ and ]
instead. The keyboard FAQ has a  link that points to diagrams of intl keyboard
layouts.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/mozkeyplan.html

Comment 19

[timeless]

if you're visually impaired, shouldn't you be using a user style sheet that has
fixed font sizes/ranges and !important?

someone described the browser as a useragent, and as such it should be helping
you to browse the web, not helping designers make it hard for you to see their
pages. this is where user.css should come into play.

Comment 20

[Kathleen :Brade]

removing EDITORBASE per meeting

Comment 21

[rubydoo123]

removing myself from the cc list

Comment 22

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

*** Bug 277652 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 23

[Karl Palsson]

This seems to be the oldest relevant bug.

This is still a problem, with firefox 1.5 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

I can use ctrl-+ and ctrl-- on the num pad, I can use ctrl-Ö for ctrl-+, as ö is in the same place as + would be on a us-english keyboard, and I can use ctrl-= as it appears properly on my keyboard.  ctrl-- works if I use what's labelled on my keyboard, but not if I use the key that actually makes a -.  (ie, for me, ctrl-þ has the effect of ctrl--)

gah.  I can type these keys! I can type + and -.  I can press ctrl and that key.  Why is something grabbing key events from some weird level before they are actually relevant?

Comment 24

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Is this still relevant?

Comment 25

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.

Comment 26

[Masayuki Nakano [:masayuki] (he/him)(JST, +0900)]

This should've been fixed in Firefox 3 or some newer versions if composer uses <key> element to handle shortcut keys. Otherwise, we don't have any plans to make JS code possible to handle it in event listeners.

Please file a new bug if you see this kind of trouble with your keyboard layout.