[for blind users] subject as link

[timterbeest]

I'm a blind user and I like Roundcube. But it is verry difficult for me to open a message. I use Jaws for Windows (www.freedomscientific.com) as screenreader. It is not possible for me to hit an enter on a message to open it. Suggestion: can you make the subject field a "normal" link

[thomasb]

Done in r567

This also enables users to right-click and choose "open link in new tab/window"

[jeblair]

Hi,

I recently demonstrated RoundCube 0.1-rc2 to our accessibility group at the University of California, Berkeley. They too found RoundCube to be a very nice webmail client, and for the most part, quite easy to use with screen reading software. The main problem they had was related to this feature request, however, so I'm reopening this old ticket.

While there is now a real link on message subjects, RoundCube prevents the event from being handled like a normal click by including this in the anchor tag:

onclick="return rcube_event.cancel(event)"

So this means that you can do all of the things you can normally do with links, but if you activate it, it does nothing. The action of the program is still dependent on the mouse click on the message row.

I'm not an expert in screen reading software, but I think you can approximate the behavior by simply navigating with the keyboard. If you tab repeatedly until you are on one of the subject links, and hit enter, you will find that nothing happens. This is analogous to the way a screen reader would activate a link.

They were eventually able to read a mail by simulating a mouse click -- but that is a rather onerous process to go through, involving switching in and out of different modes of operation with the screen reader.

I would like to find a way to make reading mail easier with a screen reader, and I appreciate how that might be difficult with the way the RoundCube list widget operates. Do you have any ideas how this can be accomplished?

Thanks,

James E. Blair
Principal Email Systems Administrator
UC Berkeley - IST

[seansan]

Add to 1.1?

[thomasb]

Since the most of our devs have no idea about screen readers we need to receive concrete suggestions!

[jeblair]

Patch to list.js and mail/func.inc to work better with screen readers

[jeblair]

I have attached a patch that we developed at UC Berkeley with some of our accessibility folks that makes RoundCube work quite well with screen readers.

It changes the subject link based in a different way based on whether the preview pane is in effect. If the preview pane is in use and you select the subject link (which is what a screen reader would do), it calls a new function in list.js that performs the same action as if you had clicked anywhere in the list row -- that is, it selects the message and displays it in the preview pane. This shouldn't be a change for a click in a regular browser, since it already does that.

If the preview pane is not in effect, it makes the subject link a normal clickable link (without the cancel event handler). If a screen reader activates it, then RoundCube displays the mail full-screen. Of course, if it is clicked by a mouse in a standard browser, it will do the same thing, which is a change from what currently happens. Currently, you have to double click in order to view the mail. This might be a welcome change for sighted users as well -- giving an option to single click to display a mail (of course, you can still double click the row).