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Bug 420540 - Firefox keyboard control wish list.
Firefox keyboard control wish list.
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: orca
Classification: Applications
Component: general
2.18.x
Other All
: Normal enhancement
: 2.20.0
Assigned To: Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie)
Orca Maintainers
Depends on:
Blocks: 404403
 
 
Reported: 2007-03-20 14:11 UTC by Rich Burridge
Modified: 2008-07-22 19:27 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
patch to implement the portion of this bug related to toggling structural navigation (3.99 KB, patch)
2007-04-26 22:55 UTC, Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie)
committed Details | Review
patch to implement blockquote structural navigation (5.15 KB, patch)
2007-05-18 21:02 UTC, Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie)
committed Details | Review

Description Rich Burridge 2007-03-20 14:11:06 UTC
From Darragh via private email. Capturing here. 

I hate having a single bug with lots of different 
ideas/suggestions in it, but I'm in a hurry so that's 
what we've got for now. We can maybe divide it up 
later after evaluation.

I'm not sure if people have already suggested these functions:

Add keystrokes control  + end and control + home to jump to the end
and start of the open page.
Break up the page content by placing all links on a new line.
so for example: {} denotes a link.
The {Orca} mailing list would be read as
The
Orca
Mailing list.
I know the Firefox team are adding keystrokes but here are a few that
I would really like to see:
t: jump to tables.
e: Jump to edit fields.
f: jump to form fields.
x: jump to checkboxes.
c: jump to combo boxes.
b: jump to buttons.
r: jump to radio button.
q: jump to quote.
d: jump to different element.
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9  jump to heading of level...

Just as a matter of interest, how hard are these quick keys to create?

On one final unrelated point.
It would be great if pressing alt on it's own would give focus to the menu bar.

This would fix one of the problems encountered by the user referenced
in the study on the gnome orca live website where the basics menu item
was not found by the user as it didn't follow the standard alt f
convention. 

thanks.
Comment 1 Rich Burridge 2007-03-24 20:50:39 UTC
Darragh sent the same message to the orca-list. There were a
few further messages. It's clear that there are:

1/ Things we aren't going to do here.
2/ Things that are already done (albeit maybe differently then Windows).
3/ Possible enhancement requests coming out of this. 

After CSUN, I suggest ww file separate rfe(s) for 3/ above, then close
out this bug.

Here are the further messages:

From Krister:
> Break up the page content by placing all links on a new line.
> > so for example: {} denotes a link.

No, no, no, no, please, please noooooooooo!!! And if it really has to be
implemented, please, please, please make it optional.
And why all the extraneous letters? Personally i'd like to just see one
more letter added to those already there, and that's f or possibly m to
move to frames.
Ok, ok "f" and "c" to move to forms and controls whether it's check
boxes or other things could be nice but not all the other stuff.

From Hermann:
I think that the discussion in this list should be based on reasonable
thinking and arguing, not on ideology.
When someone suggests to implement a feature, we can of course argue
about its sense, but the fact that it might remember at features that
are known from the MS world is not at all a reson why it shouldn't be
considdered.
We can't get anywhere, if people know very well what they don't want.
But I would be very pleased to hear from a particular person what he
_does_ want.
I think what Joanie has implemented during the last week points into the
right direction, and the only comment I can made on this work is "Go
ahead!"
My aspirations to make any application accessible are reliability, speed
and responsiveness, and I couldn't care less about the fact, whether an
idea comes from the Windows world or elsewhere. 
If someone on this list suggests new features we can argue about it, but
on a strictly rational base.

From Mike:
Just a quick note on this topic.  Several of the key ideas
discussed here  are already in the Orca spec just waiting for
implementation.  I'm just getting ready to fly to CSUN but please keep
up the discussion.  We really appreciate all the feedback we are getting
from the growing user community.

From Hermann:
 two keys already are implemented, but they seem to be a Firefox feature:
Control+Home brings you to the top of the page, while Control+End places 
the caret at the end of the page, provided caret browsing is activated, 
either by Firefox or by Orca.
To activate the menu bar by simply pressing the Alt key is a wish, which I 
think, cannot be realized by the Orca team. In Windows it is a feature 
provided by the operating system, so this wish should be addressed to the 
Gnome development team.
Regarding your suggestion to list all links, I have not understood what the 
braces {} are good for?

From Krister:
Does your ctrl+home and ctrl+end work in orca controled navigation? The
interesting thing is that on my system ctrl+home and ctrl+end only works
while Gecho has control over caret navigation. Is this a bug on my end
or can you confirm this behaviour?

From Hermann:
Control+Home/End work on my system both, Orca and Gecko controlled alike.
Ubuntu 6.10, Orca revision 2191 and yesterday's Firefox.

From Henning:
> Control+Home/End work on my system both, Orca and Gecko controlled
> > alike.

It works for me as well, however it requires ff's caret navigation mode
being enabled.

Recent Debian Sid with latest Orca Svn trunk.
Comment 2 krister 2007-03-25 10:01:34 UTC
Hi, A couple days have gone since i wrote my first comment to my wish list and i have gotten some feedback which i have considered. I'm still against breaking up a page into lines with one link on each, but the idea of marking link text in braille at least is a good one. What i mean is that in speech, orca announces "link" when it encounters a link, and that could be configurable so that it says "link" before or after the text that's a link. In braille one could have some kind of paranthesis to mark what area is clickable and thus a link, it could look something like 
"You can subscribe to [the orca list]", where the text inside the brackets are clickable.
And as i wrote why all the extraneous hot keys? I can see the need for hot keys for lists, frames, headings, (the numbers for different headings is a good idea), tables, forms and controls, but i wonder if we have to have navigation keys for each type of form field? (Note this was a question, not critisism)
I would also want to suggest yet another hot key to bypass all hot keys in order to use the excelent "find as you type" function that Mozilla has implemented and that works quite well i'd say.
/Krister
Comment 3 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-04-03 16:13:05 UTC
Regarding this:

> I would also want to suggest yet another hot key to bypass all hot keys in
> order to use the excelent "find as you type" function that Mozilla has
> implemented and that works quite well i'd say.

That makes a lot of sense to me.  Mike if you agree, what hotkey would you like?
Comment 4 krister 2007-04-03 16:41:51 UTC
Hi,
How about numeric insert+b if it isn't already taken?
Comment 5 Mike Pedersen 2007-04-03 18:16:21 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> Regarding this:
> > I would also want to suggest yet another hot key to bypass all hot keys in
> > order to use the excelent "find as you type" function that Mozilla has
> > implemented and that works quite well i'd say.
> That makes a lot of sense to me.  Mike if you agree, what hotkey would you
> like?
I don't really understand what you are asking here.  CTRL+f puts you in the find and when you press escape you are on what you searched for.  We do however need to make the find dialog speak correctly.  
Comment 6 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-04-03 18:45:13 UTC
Our problems with Find are:

1. Buttons are not in the tab order at all so you cannot use the keyboard to give focus to them.
2. We do not get any text selection related events to let us know what's going on on the screen as we are doing the find
3. We don't get anything out of text.getNSelections() to be able to identify what the selected text is when focus is returned to the document frame.

I've got bugs for each of these issues filed at Firefox's bugzilla.

What I'm wondering is this:  As a general rule, we try to avoid usurping the functionality associated with keystrokes in the mainstream app (right?).  There are, of course, reasons to do some usurping as is the case with our structural navigation as well as our controlling the caret.  In those instances, however, should we have a way for the user to toggle this on and off?  We have Orca_Modifier+F12 to toggle caretNavigation on/off.  I'm asking if we should have Orca_Modifier+Something_Else to toggle structuralNavigation on/off -- and if so, what that something_else should be. <smile>
Comment 7 krister 2007-04-03 20:55:18 UTC
Mike,
The "find as you type" feature is a feature found under the accessibility prefs in Firefox, i think it's under the advanced tab. What this feature does is that it lets me type some words or letters in a word and FF then finds this word or the closest match and places focus on it. This comes very much in handy on long web pages with loads of links or content and where you know what you're looking for. I want to be able to bypass the structural navigation and be able to use this in my opinion excelent and vastly underrated feature to its fullest.
/Krister
Comment 8 Mike Pedersen 2007-04-03 21:29:19 UTC
OK now I understand what you guys are looking for.  Lets use orca+z as I can't see "z" being needed for a core orca feature.  
Comment 9 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-04-26 22:55:20 UTC
Created attachment 87108 [details] [review]
patch to implement the portion of this bug related to toggling structural navigation

Mike and Krister, could you please give this patch a try?

Orca_Modifier+z should toggle structural navigation commands on and off.  Note that this is based on the nature of the command and not its actual keystroke.  For instance, Insert+Tab is  the command to move to the next form field.  This binding does not in any way impact Krister's ability to use the search-as-you-type feature, but it will still wind up getting disabled if you press Orca_Modifier+z because it's a structural navigation command.   With this patch, it's all or nothing; but easily toggle-able. :-)

Krister, I don't know if you've ever applied a patch before so forgive me if this is redundant.  

1. Download the patch to your desktop
2. cd into your orca directory
3. type the following (note that all punctuation counts):

patch -p0 < ~/Desktop/patch.420540-sn1

4. hit enter
5. sudo make install

If you wanted to reverse the patch  you would do the same thing.  But after step 4 you would be told that a previously-applied patch was detected.  Assume -r.  Type y and hit enter.  Then sudo make install.
Comment 10 krister 2007-04-27 09:52:55 UTC
Hi, Thanks for the instructions. I feel ashamed to say this, but i didn't even manage to download that patch. How do you download it, because there's no link to the download. Should i go into the patch and select all and then save it in some way or what gives?
/Krister the Newbie
Comment 11 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-04-27 17:31:54 UTC
Hey Krister.  Sorry about that!!

When one adds a patch in bugzilla, it is done as an attachment.   So you'll see a comment that says "created an attachment blah blah blah" where the "blah blah blah" is the ID of the patch.  Following that you'll find some text briefly explaining what the patch is.  And following that you may or may not find a longer comment.  As  a general rule, we put more detailed explanations, make requests of people (like "Krister please try this") etc. in the comment.

So generically speaking, to get a patch you locate the comment that describes the patch and follow the link within that comment called "created an attachment blah blah blah".  That will cause the patch to be displayed in your browser.  Do a "save as" to save it to your desktop.

Hope this helps!
Comment 12 Mike Pedersen 2007-04-30 16:20:17 UTC
Hey Joanie, this looks good.  The  only thing I'd add is that this probably shhould also be a chheck box in the prefs for firefox.  How about: "use orca structural navigation?"  
Comment 13 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-04-30 19:56:07 UTC
Hey Mike.  Thanks for testing.  The patch was checked in so that Rich could do the check box portion, which he has just done.  (Thanks Rich!)

So about this uber-bug.... :-)  

I believe we took care of Krister's request.  (Krister, it's checked in now so you don't have to patch.  Please let me know if we didn't take care of your request -- or confirm that we indeed have.  Thanks!)

Some of the structural navigation commands listed we've already done; some we're not going to do (like C for combo box, E for entry, etc.), correct?   I do think Q is worth doing because of blogs, and Mike indicated that he's fine with that.   Do we want to implement any form of "jump to different element?" (Or jump to next element, or jump to the end of this element, whathaveyou)  I can see some value in it.  For instance, let's say you're in a really big paragraph that you want to move beyond.  You don't know what follows the paragraph, so you don't know if O will take you just beyond it (because a large object immediately follows your current paragraph) or skip you well past a bunch of other stuff you did care about -- or would care about had you known it was there. :-)

So, Mike, please let me know what you think on this.  I'll add the blockquote structural nav in the meantime.
Comment 14 krister 2007-05-01 09:12:55 UTC
Hi, indeed you took care of my request to use the "find as you type" feature, perhaps all too well.
I'll have to report a show stopper.
Now, it seems i can't turn navigation from Orca to Gecko, at least nothing happens when i hit numeric insert +f12. Nothing happens when i try hitting any other structural navigation key either it just goes to the "find as you type" search box. If there's a check box somewhere to change the behaviour of the structural navigation i didn't see it. What obvious thing have i missed?
/Krister
Comment 15 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-01 13:10:23 UTC
Hmmmm, Krister.  I'm not sure.  If I press Insert F12 I toggle between Gecko controlling the caret and Orca controlling the caret whether structural navigation keys are on or off so I would need some more information as to the exact steps you're using and/or a full debug.out. 

As for the checkbox, I'm afraid that's currently in another patch that Rich is working on.  The latest is currently here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=433146#c36
Comment 16 krister 2007-05-01 14:15:17 UTC
Hi,
Well what i do is that i start gnome with Orca then i fire up FF on any page and then i try to do anything structural navigation and nothing happens. If i press orca modifier+tab i land on the next link, if i type a character such as "t" to get to a table, i get to the "find as you type" box as if i was writing the "t". Hitting orca modifier+f12 doesn't do anything, it doesn't switch to Gecko or Orca controled mode and ... well nothing happens.
I'm afraid it has to do with my failed attempt to patch in the patch you gave me a couple days ago, or could it have to do with the fact that i checked out and built gtkhtml from svn to check a bug in Evolution (Bug 347347) which is partially fixed. Anyways, my orca is broken and i don't know how to repair it.
/Krister
Comment 17 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-01 14:52:06 UTC
Broken is bad. :-(  But I'm around all day today so let's get it fixed.

At the risk of asking "Is it plugged in?":  I assume that Orca_Modifier is working just fine elsewhere, in other words if you're in OOo Writer, Orca_Modifier + F still gives you font info, right?  If so....

Sometimes applying a patch and then checking out the latest version can cause problems to occur.  That is why I always reverse a patch before doing an svn update.  You could try that, but the thermonuclear approach may be simpler. <grin>  I assume (there's that word again) that you are using svn update to get the latest version.  If so try the following:

1. cd ~/orca (or wherever you have your orca directory)
2. rm src/orca/Gecko.py
3. svn update
4. sudo make install

Then quit and restart Orca.

When subversion sees that one of your files has gone missing, it "updates" it by giving you a fresh one.

If that doesn't do the trick we'll keep at it.  Thanks and let me know!

Comment 18 krister 2007-05-01 19:03:38 UTC
Hi there.
The "thermonuclear" approach did the trick and in fact i write this comment from within Linux and using Orca and a Ff3 from a couple days ago, oh wonder oh glory!
Now if only i had a good ocr solution and some other stuff i could ditch windows, but that's another story.
The structural keys off thingy seems to work as expected which is great, and i do love the "navigate to form field" function.
Keep up the great work, guys!
/Krister
Comment 19 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-01 19:15:29 UTC
Hi Krister.

> The "thermonuclear" approach did the trick and in fact i write this comment
> from within Linux and using Orca and a Ff3 from a couple days ago, oh wonder oh
> glory!

You forgot oh joy!  And my favorite, awesome! :-)

Thanks so much for the update and the testing.
Comment 20 Willie Walker 2007-05-15 17:46:36 UTC
Hi All:  Let's decide which of these we're going to do and which we won't do.  Then, let's do them and close this out.  :-)  Thoughts?
Comment 21 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-15 17:52:48 UTC
From a team meeting or so ago, we decided to add blockquote structural navigation and then close this out.  2.19.3?
Comment 22 Willie Walker 2007-05-16 19:46:26 UTC
(In reply to comment #21)
> From a team meeting or so ago, we decided to add blockquote structural
> navigation and then close this out.  2.19.3?

I'm OK with that.  
Comment 23 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-18 21:02:58 UTC
Created attachment 88419 [details] [review]
patch to implement blockquote structural navigation

Q/Shift+Q for blockquotes.

In testing this, I found fewer sites using blockquotes than used to be the case -- even on blogs.  However, buzzmachine.com and boingboing.net are usually chocked full of them.  This was tested there and a few other blogs.

Mike please give this a go and let me know what you think.  Thanks!
Comment 24 Mike Pedersen 2007-05-19 16:52:59 UTC
Moving by quotes seems to be working fine.  I think it's OK to commit.
Comment 25 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-19 21:02:50 UTC
Thanks Mike.  This being a harmless addition, I agree.  Patch committed.  That's the last of the things we decided to tackle in this RFE, therefore I'm changing the status to pending.
Comment 26 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-22 15:32:58 UTC
Okay for me to close this one?
Comment 27 Mike Pedersen 2007-05-22 16:49:49 UTC
OK with me.
Comment 28 Joanmarie Diggs (IRC: joanie) 2007-05-22 17:00:10 UTC
Thanks.  Closing as FIXED.