-- Forwarded Message -- From: Jamal Mazrui Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 11:59 AM To: dev-accessibility@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Suggestions for developers of Thunderbird and other Mozilla apps I have learned as much as possible about Thunderbird 3.0 from various sources on the web, and have developed a set of JAWS scripts to improve its usability for people who operate with that screen reader, available with an executable installer at http://EmpowermentZone.com/tb_scr.exe or with a zip archive for a manual install (currently needed for Win64) at http://EmpowermentZone.com/tb_scr.zip The following is a set of suggestions that I hope Mozilla developers can implement in the next version of Thunderbird. If it is better to include such suggestions within the Bugzilla tracking system, I hope someone familiar with that system can help transfer them accordingly. In general, TB3 meets a minimum baseline of accessibility in terms of keyboard operability and screen reader output via MSAA. Much can be done, however, to make the screen reader experience more efficient and smooth. * Include all relevant controls in the navigation sequence of dialogs. In particular, make the Add button focusable in the subdialog of Account Settings after one chooses the Actions button. * Include a keyboard way of changing the sequence of columns in the message list. Currently, this can only be done with mouse drag-and-drop operations. * Include hotkeys to go directly to common folders, including Inbox, Sent, Trash, and Junk. My scripts try to implement Control+Shift+Letter combinations for this, e.g., Control+Shift+I for Inbox. The scripts use the JAWS off screen model (OSM) to find the folder name, route the mouse pointer to it, and then click. This works sometimes but is not reliable because the folder name is not always visible, or the word appears in another context than being the clickable folder name. * Use a delimiter character other than a space to seperate columnar data in the MSAA AccName property of a message list item. It is difficult to reliably parse out, say, the subject from the sender from the recipient of a message when only spaces seperate each data item. I suggest a Tab character as a delimiter (\t). * Ensure that all relevant message status information is available in MSAA properties. For example, attachment data is not currently available via MSAA. * In message composition mode, use seperate edit controls for the To, CC, and BCC fields. Currently, one control is used with a preceding ComboBox to select whether To, CC, or BCC, is applicable. This arrangement is quite inefficient from a keyboard standpoint. Much better would be seperate controls with initial letter hotkeys, e.g., Alt+T for the To field, Alt+C for the CC field, and Alt+B for the BCC field. Alt+S does currently work for focusing on the Subject field. My scripts also try to implement Alt+M for the message body. * Avoid using the same hotke for completely different tasks. For example, F7 is currently used for caret-browsing mode when reading a message, and for the spell checker when writing a message. * Prevent Control+W from exiting the application. Currently, one can inadvertently exit Thunderbird by pressing Control+W to close a message when only one tab is open. * Include quality documentation with Thunderbird, e.g., available from the Help menu and with the F1 key. The lack of TB documentation is a usability barrier generally, and an accessibility barrier to people with disabilities. A visually obvious behavior of the application may be completely unknown to us without documentation that describes how the program responds in a given context to input events or setting changes. Also include a Help button in the Account Settings and Options dialogs (like Firefox has). I hope these suggestions are helpful in a team effort to make Thunderbird and other Mozilla applications more productive to users with disabilities. Regards, Jamal _______________________________________________ dev-accessibility mailing list dev-accessibility@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-accessibility __________ Visit and contribute to The JAWS Script Repository http://jawsscripts.com View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/jawsscripts