GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 94358
No initial visible focus
Last modified: 2012-09-10 12:54:36 UTC
On the multihead branch: There never seems to be visible focus when you key nav around Gnome. You need to hit tab or arrow to make focus visible. For example, if entering a directory and focus is (invisibly) in the main pane, hitting shift+F10 gives you a grayed out icon menu for a non-existent icon.
Updating status_whiteboard field to reflect A11Y team's assessment of accessibility impact.
Apologies for spam... marking as GNOMEVER2.3 so it appears on the official GNOME bug list :)
Apologies for spam-- ensuring Sun a11y team are cc'ed on all current a11y bugs. Filter on "SUN A11Y SPAM" to ignore.
*** Bug 167486 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Apologies for spam... ensuring Sun a11y folks are cc'ed on all current accessibility bugs.
This is an old bug but there's been little clarification of the issue or a proposed solution. Can anybody elaborate?
When a nautilus window is opened the focus is on the main pane but there is no visible indication of this. This can be verified by pressing Shift+F10 which bring up the context menu for the main pane. This bug was a request that there be some visible indication of this. The fact that we have survived this long with so little activity on this bug suggests that this is not a major issue and could perhaps be closed as willnotfix.
(In reply to comment #7) Thanks for the update Padraig. > The fact that we have survived this long with so little activity on this bug > suggests that this is not a major issue and could perhaps be closed as > willnotfix. I think it is a major issue, both for a11y and usability. The main thing we need is a proposal for how to fix this. The obvious thing to do would be to draw some kind of highlight round the inner edge of the viewing area, I suppose...
There is precedent for drawing a standard focus indicator around the background -- Yelp does this (or at least, it did in 2.x -- haven't checked in 3.0). Interestingly though, Yelp doesn't draw it immediately when you open the window, but only if you press Tab to move focus to the first link, then Shift-Tab to move it back to the page background. I forget if this was a deliberate aesthetic compromise, or if it's just a bug. (Cc'ing Shaun to find out...)
Just tested Yelp 2 and Yelp 3. Yelp 2 does focus the entire page, but it doesn't have a visual indication of it unless you Tab to the first link and then Shift+Tab back to the page. Yelp 3 doesn't behave the same. The initial focus is (and the focus after Shift+Tab from the first link) seems to be on the scrolled window. This is mentioned in bug #613657. But Yelp isn't doing anything special with focus or visual indicators of focus. The behavior in Yelp 2 is just the default behavior of Gecko. The behavior in Yelp 3 is just the default behavior of WebKit. I've left bug #613657 open because of this behavior, but the proper fix should probably be in WebKitGTK+.
Thanks, I'd forgotten it would be Gecko that controlled the focus indicator. Sure enough, I see the same behaviour in Firefox. As I mentioned in comment #9, I suspect that Gecko behaviour is deliberate, although I can't find any confirmation of that at the moment -- especially when it's being used in a regular web browser, you probably wouldn't want every page to open with a dotted line around it by default, even though strictly speaking, it ought to. But equally, you wouldn't want the focus indicator to disappear at any point once you did start to Tab around things. Whether it makes sense to apply the same logic to Nautilus, I'm not sure. I'd guess not, as people don't spend their lives making pixel perfect Nautilus pages only to have them spoiled by a dotted line around the edge :)
*** Bug 672281 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Cosimo and I agree with Padraig. The list or grid views have focus by default but we don't think it makes sense to draw a focus rectangle around the entire view. If we did this we'd want to do it consistently for all GNOME apps and that would add a significant amount of visual noise. The selected item is indicated in the view once you start to keynav and that seems like it is good enough.