Tabbing is inconsistent and awkward

[krchristie]

As I mentioned in previous discussions of curation flow and the desired behavior of the new Standard Annotations form, I prefer to be able to tab through the entire interface with little or no need to use the mouse to move between fields. However, I find that the form is not set up well to be able to tab smoothly through the form without needing to use the mouse to reset the cursor position or tab backwards.

A. Tabbing behavior of the Gene Product field is odd and inconsistent with normal tabbing behavior.

• 1. Type "Ift88 mm" in the field. This is enough for an autocomplete option for "Ift88 Mmus" to appear in a yellow row below the entry field.
• 2. Click the down arrow to select the yellow row for "Ift88 Mmus". This will change the shade of the row to indicate that it is selected.
• 3. Hit the return key to confirm selection. This brings you back the entry box with a cursor flashing at the end of the text in the box ("Ift88 Mmus" in this case).
• 4. Hitting the tab key does NOT move one to the next box ("GP to Term Relation"), but instead the cursor disappears and the Gene Product box is still the active box. It requires hitting the tab key a 2nd time in order to move to the next box ("GP to Term Relation"). In contrast, when I do a similar thing in the "GO Term" box, once I have hit "Return" to select the highlighted row to end back up in the box with the cursor flashing at the end of the text, hitting tab immediately moves the active site to the three dots to the right of the first row. Hitting the tab key ONE time is the expected and desired behavior in all boxes that require one to select an option from the autocomplete suggestions.

B. The set up of the Extensions and Comments sections produce undesirable tabbing behavior.

• If one is tabbing through the Standard Annotations form, one must press the "Return" key while the "Add Extension" button is selected to generate the data entry boxes. However, these data entry boxes get generated above the "Add Extension" button, while the selected field that is active remains on the "Add Extension" button. Thus, in order to tab to the correct place to start entering data again, one must tab backwards three times. While functional, this is tedious. This is a significant problem for MGI as we add extensions very frequently.
• The Comments section behaves similarly except for a different number of backward tabs being required to get to the first data entry field for the Comment.
• I think it would be a vast improvement for people who prefer to be able to move through the form with the keyboard if the Extensions and Comments fields were present all the time with three dots at the end of each row so that one could tab to the three dots and press return to get an option to add an additional row for another extension or comment.
• If the reason the fields are not shown at the beginning is because the are optional, rather than required, perhaps we could put "(optional) after the words "Extensions" and "Comments" to make it clear that those fields are not required.
• Alternatively, please make sure to reset the position of the cursor to be in the first box of an Extension or Comment row when a new row is generated.

C. location of cursor after pressing "return" key to "Save"

• It would be highly desirable for the cursor position to reset to the "Gene Product" field after either the "Save" or the "Clear" button is used so that the form is ready to be filled again without needing to use the mouse to reset the cursor.

tagging @LiNiMGI