Comment 1 by mreiser on 2012-05-14 21:29
This also happens in firefox 12 so changing the description to make it more general.
Changes:
Changed title from "Alt down arrow doesn't open combo boxes in ie9" to "Alt down arrow doesn't open combo boxes in browse mode"

Comment 2 by Palacee_hun on 2012-05-15 12:16
I think the problem here is that you press Enter on the combo box before attempting to open it with Alt-down. Enter in itself takes you to focus mode, opens the box, and after pressing it you can navigate in the box with the arrow keys. When at this point, there's simply no point in opening it again with Alt-down. I think it was never intended to work that way as the behaviour of NVDA is consistent across versions at least back to 2011.2 (that's how far I went back when investigating). So either Enter or Alt-down to open a combo box, but not both. To collapse it you can use either Alt-up or Esc, but similarly of course not both.
[[BR]]
If I'm right, then this ticket is a strong candidate for "works for me".

Comment 3 by mreiser on 2012-05-15 15:51
Unfortunately this can have a negative result on some sites when pressing down arrow in the combo box initiates an action. Most other screen readers use enter to interact with the combo and alt downarrow to expand or open it. I'll try doing it the other way and see if that makes any difference.

Comment 4 by jteh (in reply to comment 3) on 2012-05-15 16:10
Replying to mreiser:

Unfortunately this can have a negative result on some sites when pressing down arrow in the combo box initiates an action.

You can press alt+downArrow while in browse mode to expand the combo box. NVDA will automatically switch to focus mode when you do this.

Nevertheless, alt+downArrow while on a combo box in focus mode probably shouldn't switch back to browse mode if it expands the combo box, so this is still a bug, though the work around is easy as described above.

Comment 5 by jhomme on 2012-05-30 11:44
It's probably a bad idea for NVDA to interfere with the browser behavior, but I'm going to ask anyway. Do you feel that it might be OK for NVDA to expand the box when the user presses Enter to go into Forms mode?

Comment 6 by jteh (in reply to comment 5) on 2012-05-30 22:01
Replying to jhomme:

It's probably a bad idea for NVDA to interfere with the browser behavior, but I'm going to ask anyway. Do you feel that it might be OK for NVDA to expand the box when the user presses Enter to go into Forms mode?

I think this is a bad idea. If you want this, you can already press alt+downArrow while in browse mode. Enter is not supposed to do anything other than switch to focus mode for interactive controls.

Comment 7 by jteh on 2013-05-29 21:21
Changes:
Milestone changed from None to 2013.2

Comment 9 by James Teh <jamie@... on 2013-05-29 21:37
In [00cf611]:

Pressing alt+downArrow or alt+upArrow to expand a combo box while in focus mode no longer incorrectly switches to browse mode.

Fixes #2340.

Changes:
State: closed