JS controls for bug subscription are hard to use with screen readers

[Brad Crittenden]

At UDS Huw and I did a very simple walk-through of the new bug subscription features with Luke (themuso). He was using Firefox 4 with gnome-orca as the screen reader.

On a bug page the "Subscribe to bug mail link" was easily found. The overlay was presented but didn't get focus. Luke had to find it where it lived in the DOM.

On a project page, the link to open the control was found. Using it he was frustrated when he tried to use ESC to close a drop-down selection and the entire overlay was closed. Similarly, when presented with the accordion widget he found no way to open it to reveal the contents. The usual way to do that using the keyboard is via the ENTER key but it caused the overlay form to be submitted.

It was also noted that when new elements were visually revealed on the page there was no notification of their appearance. Subsequent exploration via the screen reader showed the new elements but there was no indication that the form contents had changed.

[Francis J. Lacoste (flacoste)]

That's a regression in the accessibility of the subscription control.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I see 3 issues that need fixing:
1. When the overlay is shown, focus must be given to the first control
2. Users can leave the overlay, but the tab key should cycle through the overlay.
3. the accordion widget does not recognise the "enter" key to toggle state.

1 and 2 might be solved by changing the subscription overlay to extend lp's PrettyOverlay which handles tabs and seems to focus correctly. Otherwise _getTabNodes and _handleTab are needed. These methods also illustrate how to focus elements and capture keypresses. The accodion will need extending or patching to understand key presses.

[Launchpad QA Bot (lpqabot)]

Fixed in stable r16373 <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/stable/revision/16373>.