GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 589455
Can not activate links with structural navigation keys
Last modified: 2009-11-09 21:35:30 UTC
Please describe the problem: When navigating with next/previous link keys on a web page pressing enter does not activate the chosen link. Steps to reproduce: Do a search in Google Use the 3 key to move to the first search result. Press enter to activate the link. Nothing happens. Press u to get to the next unvisited link press enter. Nothing happens. Press shift U to get to the prefious link. Nothing happens. Press tab to get to the next link. If you press enter the link will now activate. If you use shift tab to go the the previous link it will also activate. Actual results: See above Expected results: When Orca anounces that a bit of text is a link, it should activate with the press of the enter key regardless of what key press causes it to land on the link. The result for u, U, h, H, 1-6, etc should all be the same, if it is a link, enter should activate it. Does this happen every time? Yes Other information:
Thanks Storm. I'll look into it this weekend. I am going to reduce the severity to normal, however. According to GNOME's bugzilla, the definition of "Major" is "Major loss of functionality- menu item broken, data output extremely incorrect, or otherwise difficult/useless to use." Pressing Tab followed by Shift+Tab is not ideal, but it's not outrageous. Plus in testing last night after seeing your message, U/Shift+U and V/Shift+V were working for me on all of the pages I'd tried them on, so the functionality is not totally busted.
Created attachment 139219 [details] [review] Fix Storm, have you been running the latest Orca? The reason I ask is that I could not reproduce the bug as you described with respect to using U/Shift+U and V/Shift+V. The reason why I could not was because a few weeks ago, as part of a totally unrelated fix, I changed how we handled U/Shift+U and V/Shift+V doing an explicit focus grab rather than merely positioning the cursor there. I was able to reproduce the bug for headings -- at least for the sponsored link heading (the first result at heading level 3 when you do a Google Search). The issue seems to be that the link is in a heading and the heading is in a list item. Therefore, this patch does an explicit focus grab any time we're doing a _presentObject in structural navigation for Gecko and the object we're trying to present happens to be a link. The end result: 1. The bug goes away. :-) 2. Even for items where I was not able to reproduce the bug (i.e. I could press Enter to follow a link), before all I saw visually was the caret at the beginning of the link. Now what I see is a focus rectangle. In other words, these blessed things definitely have focus and pressing Enter on them does what you expect it to do. I ran this patch against all of the regression tests related to Gecko structural navigation and it passed with flying colors. Therefore I've gone ahead and checked this patch into git master.