Improved Accessibility for Only Keyboard Users

[uncrushedreverb]

Happy premium customer since 2013 here!

I just saw you were working on a refresh for NewsBlur and thought now would be the time to raise my issue.

I’m almost exclusively a keyboard user, making use of the Tridactyl addon (GitHub - tridactyl/tridactyl: A Vim-like interface for Firefox, inspired by Vimperator/Pentadactyl.) to make the all websites keyboard driven.

Below is a screenshot of the “hint” mode on the new beta site. By hitting f/F the browser extension finds all links in the page and makes them accessible with any further keystroke. In this example: hitting w would select the second article down, hk would load the article at the bottom, js would jump to the Hacker News: 50 site, jo would jump to One Foot Tsunami, etc. For daily use I generally have no problem not using a mouse at all.

The problem for me is parts of the page are implemented in a way that isn’t detected by the link hinting. Selecting folders and sites works. As do the buttons for moving up, down, Next Unread; Feed and Text views; and Full, Split, List and Grid views.

The Global Shared Stories, All Shared Stores, Infrequent Site Stories, All Site Stories buttons are not recognized. The little dropdown that shows on mouse-over for sites and stories doesn’t work without a mouse. The preference menus and their tabs are complete inaccessible.

The biggest win for me would be the most commonly used items (Infrequent Site Stories, All Site Stories) and being able to rename or force refresh a site using the existing dropdown menus. Currently I can use the default shortcuts CTRL+e for All Sites Stories, and u for mark unread, but it would be useful if you could look into making other mouse driven elements accessible too.

[samuelclay]

This is a terrific idea and thank you for suggesting it. I love the idea of 100% keyboard navigation. I downloaded tridactyl and fixed a ton of issues. I also made some judgement calls on those context menus. When I hooked up every context menu in both the feed list and story list, everything because double-letters. It was chaos. So I dialed it back and just gave context menu access to the story titles.

I also hooked up the Infrequent Sites Stories and other top header feeds. Unfortunately I must not be using the extension right because I could get them to work, I wasn’t able to switch back and forth repeatedly, either due to operator error or there’s something more fundamental that I’m missing. It works the first time, but after that tridactyl seems to prefer the hover state over the click state. Maybe that’s a preference or keyboard command I didn’t know? Let me know how it works for you, happy to make adjustments.

And I confirmed you can now rename a feed without leaving your keyboard.