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The @thunderbird betas have a rewritten main window UI. This has a lot of accessibility problems. Unfortunately, I currently don’t have the energy to file the bugs myself. Here’s what I found:

1. Too many tab stops. Toolbars should definitely be a one-tabstop container and employ the ARIA toolbar design pattern.
2. Speaking of which, the containers should all be made into proper toolbar containers in the process.
3. The main messages list should be a tree with tree items, since they are collapsible. List and list items are not. Also, there are a lot of focus issues still remaining when deleting messages/threads or when the view refreshes from the IMAP server.

Perhaps someone on the team can convert these into proper bugs in Bugzilla, or maybe most of these are already filed. Like I said, I unfortunately currently lack the energy to do so myself.

@Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox

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in reply to Marco Zehe

Brandon
Brandon
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I’m using mail for windows until these things get addressed. These are obvious regressions.
in reply to Marco Zehe

Peter Vágner
Peter Vágner
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Me and guy named ali-savas have filed most of these as proper mozilla bugs. Alesandro, Elizabeth and other people on the #Thunderbird team are tackling these as they can. I can already see some of them being addressed in nightlies. Would you like me to post links to individual bugs?
#thunderbird
in reply to Peter Vágner

Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox
• •
@pvagner Just wanted to jump in and express our appreciation for the work you've done submitting these bugs. We know it takes time and patience to get that done. Thank you!
@Peter Vágner
in reply to Marco Zehe

Peter Vágner
Peter Vágner
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I have accidentally posted all the issue links twice.
Just to add into it here are some recent accessibility related enhancements I have recognized.
reporting message columns is now greatly inproved in Thunderbird 114, it is now possible to inwoke the context menu in the message list, dropdown buttons in the message reader UI can now be activated with the enter or space key.
F6 and shift+F6 navigation has been improved so it can be inwoked when filter buttons or the edit field has the focus.
in reply to Marco Zehe

Aleca
Aleca
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Hi Marco, I'm the product design manager at Thunderbird. Thank you so much for trying out beta and for this overview of the issues you encountered. We're 100% aware of all of these and we already have bugs and work in progress patches to address the issues.
ARIA toolbar design pattern is currently on alpha (daily) for the message pane, and it will be added to the main toolbar as well in the next months, alongside updating the container markup.
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