GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 442709
[verified] Need to do "combo box cleanup"/refactor for Firefox
Last modified: 2008-07-22 19:27:41 UTC
There have been quite a few changes to combo boxes in Firefox over the past couple of months, including a large "a11y HTML combo box clean-up" done by Aaron. Now that things are hopefully stabilizing on the Gecko combo box front, we need to do our own "combo box cleanup" including: 1. Re-examine the existing code and remove things that no longer apply in terms of combo box hierarchy (including in onFocus and the braille and speech generators) 2. Fix some bugs (such as expanded XUL combo boxes not speaking and/or brailling correctly) 3. Cause Alt Down Arrow to give focus to the combo box that contains a focused menu item and then expand that combo box. See bug #440079. 4. Not say "menu item" for combo boxes (even though a menu item is showing and/or has focus). See bug #440079. 5. Taking STATE_SHOWING into consideration once it's implemented for menu items within combo boxes (Aaron is working on this currently) 6. Handle additional spurious focus events (should they persist -- this changed in the 29th May build of Firefox) which causes double-speaking.
7. Figure out why moving into and out of an HTML combo box is so slow -- not just with form field structural navigation, but when tabbing into and/or out of them.
8. Be sure that structural navigation doesn't kick in when a combo box has focus (i.e. so that one can use first letter navigation to jump to an item)
Created attachment 89962 [details] [review] proposed patch This is the bulk of it: 1. Re-examine the existing code and remove things that no longer apply in terms of combo box hierarchy (including in onFocus and the braille and speech generators) Done. 2. Fix some bugs (such as expanded XUL combo boxes not speaking and/or brailling correctly) Done. 3. Cause Alt Down Arrow to give focus to the combo box that contains a focused menu item and then expand that combo box. See bug #440079. Done. 4. Not say "menu item" for combo boxes (even though a menu item is showing and/or has focus). See bug #440079. Done. 5. Taking STATE_SHOWING into consideration once it's implemented for menu items within combo boxes (Aaron is working on this currently) Done in one place; I want to see about its applicability to some sluggishness issues. 6. Handle additional spurious focus events (should they persist -- this changed in the 29th May build of Firefox) which causes double-speaking. Done. 7. Figure out why moving into and out of an HTML combo box is so slow -- not just with form field structural navigation, but when tabbing into and/or out of them. On pages with really large combo boxes (like certain pages in Bugzilla), I see this sluggishness even if Orca is not running. But I want to look at this further. 8. Be sure that structural navigation doesn't kick in when a combo box has focus (i.e. so that one can use first letter navigation to jump to an item) Done. Note that we are not getting events, however, so currently focus will move and Orca will not say/braille anything in response. Aaron has just fixed this so theoretically it should "just work" in the next build of Firefox. In the meantime, we're no longer jumping out of the combo box like we were. Mike please test. In order to test this with the latest build that includes a number of fixes made by Ginn, you may need to do an 'export GNOME_ACCESSIBILITY=1' and then launch Firefox from the command line. Thanks!
Re this: > Done. Note that we are not getting events, however, so currently focus will > move and Orca will not say/braille anything in response. Aaron has just fixed > this so theoretically it should "just work" in the next build of Firefox. In > the meantime, we're no longer jumping out of the combo box like we were. The Firefox bug fix is in the current build, and the attached patch works with it as expected.
I was chatting with Will about this. He has reviewed the patch and suggested that I commit it for inclusion in 2.19.4. Done.
Other than the sluggishness problems in large combos and the problems with first letter navigation that you can do nothing about I'd say this is now working quite well.
Ignore my previous comment about first character nav it's just a feature of the sluggishness. It actually works if you wait long enough.
Thanks. Closing this one as FIXED. I'm going to continue looking at the sluggishness as part of the larger issue of identifying items we should -- and should not -- be progressing through character by character.