When re-doing the tabs panel, accessibility must be implemented correctly, too. This does not only mean proper contentDescription, but also proper keyboard accessibility. The current tabs panel has several keyboard-related issues: 1. When activating it, it is easy to fall out of it back into the surrounding UI. 2. When going up from the first item, one lands on the "new tab" button. When going back down, one does not re-land on the first item as expected, but on the second, or even falls out of the panel. 3. Left and right should always go to the correct "Close" button for a tab, I've found that sometimes, the wrong tab is being closed when pressing Enter. These all can be tested without TalkBack enabled, by using a device with a directional controller, or a touch-screen device with a Bluetooth keyboard paired and using the arrow keys and Enter. The following items should be met: 1. contentDescription is to be applied to all elements like image buttons and others where appropriate. 2. All elements must be focusable, even pure text labels, so screen reader users can read them. Use android:focusable=”true”, setFocus, isFocusable or requestFocus as appropriate. 3. Make sure focus order is logical. If the natural proximity from top left to bottom right turns out to not be logical or not deliver the desired results, use nextFocusDown, nextFocusLeft, nextFocusRight and nextFocusUp More information can be found in this tutorial: http://www.netmagazine.com/tutorials/making-android-apps-voice-output-accessible

Adding ibarlow and mfinkle to CC, just in case.

I think bug 854457 and bug 854458 address the issues mentioned in comment #0. One question: When the tabs panel opens, is the awesome bar still visible? I am able to navigate to it still. If yes, that's OK, if not, and the keyboard navigation takes one to a place that is currently not visible, that should still be addressed.

(In reply to Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ) from comment #2) > I think bug 854457 and bug 854458 address the issues mentioned in comment #0. > One question: When the tabs panel opens, is the awesome bar still visible? I > am able to navigate to it still. If yes, that's OK, if not, and the keyboard > navigation takes one to a place that is currently not visible, that should > still be addressed. Yes, the awesome bar is kept visible when the tabs panel is open. As for the input focus going to a non-visible UI element, yes, we have a few instances of this problem right now. Those should be fixed as part of this bug I think.

From comment 2 it seems like this is resolved in other bugs.