In bug 1606920 Jamie suggested that when the view is closed and the user presses DOWN, we select the first top site, so that the user doesn't have to press DOWN twice to select the first result. Verdi agrees with that statement.

I pointed out that the change may somehow affect the easiness of searching from that point, because once you press down we put some text (url) in the input field, and then to search you either have to press ESC twice, or ctrl+k or cancel the whole text. One-off buttons are hidden in this case.
May be worth confirming with PM that it's an acceptable outcome, and likely develop behind a pref.

Blocking update1 for now, but may also be part of update2, TBD.

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #0)

Blocking update1 for now,

I think this is out of scope for the reasons you mentioned. It may seem like an obvious thing to do at first but the devil is in the details.

Note that a screen reader user will find this more confusing than most because when they press down arrow, they'll hear "expanded", but no item will get reported. It's not clear that the list appeared but just has nothing selected.

Updating the Accessibility Team's impact assessment to conform with the new triage guidelines. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Triage for descriptions of these whiteboard flags.