Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) Reporter
	Description • 16 years ago

The way the "from" etc. header values (the labels that show the actual address) are implemented right now, presents several problems for accessibility. The most prominent of these is that there is no way to associate one label's meaning to another label. In other words, a label that contains an e-mail address as its caption/accessible name, cannot have the corresponding header type like "to" have associated with it as its name as well.

Therefore, I suggest to change the control that displays the actual address into a read-only textbox. With styling, the text can be underlined as it is now, with an onclick event handler, the popup menu can be brought up just the same as it is now when clicking on the label. So if done right, the user should not notice any difference. The items are tabbable already, so there won't be any difference, either.

But for accessibility, this would mean that the header value becomes the actual textbox's text, and the label that contains which header the address represents, can become the accessible name for each textbox, clearly associating the header type with its value. Bugs such as bug 445062 which suggest a terrible hack to expose that information, would be obsoleted by this fix.

	Ben Bucksch (:BenB)
	Comment 1 • 16 years ago

This bug is only about the email address fields.
The other fields (Subject, Date etc.) are already textfields.

	Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) Reporter
	Comment 2 • 16 years ago

After discussing with Dascher on IRC, here's the idea:
The node that gets focus when tabbing through the preview pane or message window, should receive an additional attribute called aria-label. The value of aria-label is a concatenated string consisting of:
a) The type of header (from:, to: etc.)
b) The person's name.
c) The person's e-mail address.
Even though the e-mail address is only shown when hovering, it should be included here for simplicity so all information is immediately accessible.

	Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]
	Comment 3 • 16 years ago

Assuming gloda gets finalized in this release we'll shift our weight over to polish and finalizing lots of the message reader elements.  Bumping this out to the rc1 milestone so it doesn't get lost in the meantime.

	Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)
	Comment 4 • 16 years ago

While I'd love to see this fix make Thunderbird 3, we've got far too much work on our plate as it is.  Given that we've shipped with this problem in the past, if this were the last bug keeping us from shipping the changes already built up in the tree, I don't think we'd hold for it.  Setting blocking-thunderbird3-. That said, if someone wants to sign up to do the work, that would be fantastic...

	Lim Yuen Hoe Assignee
	Comment 5 • 16 years ago

I'd like to sign up, and give fixing this a shot :)

	Mark Banner (:standard8)
	Comment 6 • 16 years ago

(In reply to comment #5)
> I'd like to sign up, and give fixing this a shot :)

Please do, I've set you as assignee, I'm sure Dan won't mind.

	Lim Yuen Hoe Assignee
	Comment 7 • 16 years ago

First patch. Works perfectly on simple settings. Not tested very thoroughly yet though.

Not too sure if I'm doing things the right way too. Will appreciate pointers :)

	Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) Reporter
	Comment 8 • 16 years ago

Comment on attachment 362481 [details] [diff] [review]
First patch attempt

>+            // add aria-label with important accessibility information...

I'd rewrite this to say "Add aria-label with header field type and header field content for better accessibility."

>+            var ariaLabel = this.getAttribute("label") + ", " + aEmailNode.getAttribute("label");

I suggest to put ": " instead of ", ", since this will be more natural sounding than when a comma is inserted in this spot.

	Lim Yuen Hoe Assignee
	Comment 9 • 16 years ago

Incorporated MarcoZ's suggestions. Working as far as I can tell.

	Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) Reporter
	Comment 10 • 16 years ago

Comment on attachment 362584 [details] [diff] [review]
Updated, working patch.

This works very nicely, thanks!

	Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)
	Comment 11 • 16 years ago

Thanks for the patch.  Even though it's short, I probably won't get a chance to review until later this week, as I have to bear down on 3.0 beta 2.

	Ben Bucksch (:BenB)
	Comment 12 • 16 years ago

FWIW, looks good to me, r=BenB (if that helps any)

	Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)
	Comment 13 • 16 years ago

Comment on attachment 362584 [details] [diff] [review]
Updated, working patch.

This looks good; thanks for the patch!  r=dmose  For future patches, please wrap lines that you add at 80 columns; I'll fix this one locally before I test it and push it.

	Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)
	Comment 14 • 16 years ago

Patch updated; changeset 2009:96850ecdab8a pushed.

	Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)
	Comment 15 • 16 years ago

(In reply to comment #14)
> Patch updated; changeset 2009:96850ecdab8a pushed.

ref: http://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/96850ecdab8a

Yuen Hoe -- Thanks and keep up the good work! :)

	Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) Reporter
	Comment 16 • 16 years ago

Verified fixed in Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090221 Shredder/3.0b3pre

	Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)
	Comment 17 • 16 years ago

This is an assigned student-project from NUS for CS3108 08/09 Semester 2.

	Thomas D. (:thomas8)
	Comment 18 • 15 years ago

I have some doubts if this works for the date header (there's two date headers in the xul, one of which gets never shown, since we've moved the date header to the right and there it has a class of its own, "dateLabel" iirc, which also breaks focus indication).

Also, does it work for non-standard headers like website header of rss feeds?