GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 542049
Orca does not land on visited links in Firefox 3.0
Last modified: 2008-07-11 17:13:59 UTC
Please describe the problem: When opening a web page, visit any link and go bakc to the former page, you don't land on the link you started from. The link is announced as "visited", so Orca should track it. In fact it does not or hardly. Steps to reproduce: 1. Open Firefox with any web page. 2. Choose a link and click on it. 3. Click the back button to get back to the former page. You should land on the visited link, but you don't. Actual results: You get back to the former page, but you land on its title. Expected results: To land on the visited link. Does this happen every time? Have not tested each and every site, but I surely reproduced it on several pages. Other information: See my examples written in the Orca mailing list. It happens in Firefox 3.0 with the very latest Orca. There used to be better results with the developer versions of FF, including the very latest 3.1a1pre.
Thanks Hermann. Pasting the examples here so that I don't misplace them. :-) ------------- OK, I've taken a look again with two sites I often use: (Perhaps you gess it *grin*) http://www.fr-online.de/ and http://www.dradio.de/ On both sites I never land on a visited link: On the FR page: Open for example a department: Politik (politics) Wirtschaft (business) etc. and go back and forward. The same operation on the radio page: Open for example the both "Vorschau" links, they are the program preview of the day. Do the same back and forward operation. You never succeed. Note: I use FF 3.0 and the very latest Orca. With the developer versions, including 3.1a1pre, I had more sucess, perhaps 50:50.
Well, I have good news or bad news depending on one's outlook on life. *smile* I tried the following test: 1. Load http://www.fr-online.de/ 2. Press Tab to get to the Politik link and noted that there was a focus rectangle (little dots which surrounded the link) as a result. 3. Pressed Enter to follow the link 4. Pressed Alt+Left Arrow to go back to the previous page. The expectation is that the focus rectangle would still be on the Politik link. It was not. 5. Pressed Tab once to move to the next link. The expectation is that I would land on Wirtschaft. That didn't happen. Instead I landed on the banner ad at the top of the page. This is all *without* Orca running. The way the "remember the link when you go back" code in Orca works is this: When you go back to the previous page under normal circumstances, the link you were on reclaims focus (it gets a little focus rectangle and, more importantly, emits focus events telling us that it has focus). Before the fix for that bug, we ignored such focus events and started from the top of the page; now we attend to them. But if nothing is claiming focus -- or if the document frame itself is -- there's not much we can do. So.... Is this a Mozilla bug? Hard to say. I haven't looked at the site's markup to see exactly what's causing it. But my bet is that it's something intentional implemented on the part of the designer. If that is the case, the Mozilla folks will suggest that we contact the page authors. :-( Mike, Will: Thoughts/suggestions on how I should proceed?
I've retested the FR-site using Jaws and compared it with IE: With Jaws and FF3 under Windows I see the same behavior, I don't get back to the visited link. A compare with IE indicates, that it is possible to land on former visited links, nearly 100%. "Nearly" means, that in one case it didn't work, but repeating it, I got back to the visited links. The problem is, that especially in the morning, it is hard to reach the pages, because lots of people want to read their newspaper. So only parts of the pages get loaded, and in that case, the test fails. But if the sites are loaded completely, you get back on visited links using Jaws 8.0 and IE7. So what is causing the bug? Perhaps Mozilla, but the designers of the page might also play a part in this. I doubt that it makes much sense to contact the web designers, because they offer the newspaper free of cost and therefore they use lots of scripts which place advertisment on the site; I suspect that this also is responsible for the problems. For financial reasons they cannot change much. But what about my 2nd example, the radio page? Retesting it under Windows with Jaws and FF3 indicates, that it is possible 100% to get back to the visited links; the same with IE7. The "Deutschland Radio" is a public radio, so they don't have to use scripts related to advertisment. In addition I think that this page is much better designed; it's easy to use, although it is large and structured not too simple.
It is my opinion that the blind user should get the same experience as the sighted user. If the web page puts focus on a certain spot (or takes it away), that's what the web content provider intended. I personally get angry when coming across sights that do this, and I contact the provider to change their poor behavior. Having said that, we could potentially try to remember where you were when you followed a link and override the web content provider's intentions. It might be a workable solution for stupid pages, but I suspect it will be a broken solution for smart pages. Furthermore, the page might have been a dynamically generated page whose content changed before going back to it. I'm tempted to close this as WONTFIX because I view this really as a content provider choice/issue, but I will defer to our UI lead on this. Mike?
I agree with Will on this one. Lets not fix poorly behaved pages at the risk of fixing all the places where this functionality is now working well.