Holding down spacebar doesn't result in continuous kicks

[Nancy-Salpepi]

Test device
MacBook Air (m1 chip)

Operating System
12.2.1

Browser
safari and chrome

Problem description
For phetsims/qa#781:
I know that only a basic version of keyboard nav was enabled at this point, but I think that holding down the spacebar should produce continuous kicks in the same way that clicking and holding on the mouse does. As of now, you have to press the spacebar each time to produce a kick.

Pressing and holding down the 'return' key produces continuous kicks.

Looking at the keyboard dialogs in BASE and Friction, the spacebar is usually used to press buttons.

Troubleshooting information: !!!!! DO NOT EDIT !!!!! Name: ‪Center and Spread‬ URL: https://phet-dev.colorado.edu/html/center-and-spread/1.0.0-dev.11/phet/center-and-spread_all_phet.html Version: 1.0.0-dev.11 2022-03-07 01:50:02 UTC Features missing: applicationcache, applicationcache, touch Flags: pixelRatioScaling User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.4758.80 Safari/537.36 Language: en-US Window: 980x467 Pixel Ratio: 2.5/1 WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium) GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0 Chromium) Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL) Vertex: attribs: 16 varying: 31 uniform: 1024 Texture: size: 16384 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 16, combined: 80) Max viewport: 16384x16384 OES_texture_float: true Dependencies JSON: {}

[samreid]

I am able to reproduce this behavior. @jessegreenberg is this behaving as expected? How should we proceed?

[samreid]

@jessegreenberg can you help us estimate effort for this issue?

[jessegreenberg]

Sorry, I don't have a good solution for this. Press and hold functionality of RectangularPushButton (and therefore PushButtonModel) is not supported with alt input yet.

Also, I noticed that if you press and hold the enter key it will queue up many events - one for each click event received by the browser, and the interval can be every few ms depending on the user's system settings.

The general work for this issue is in phetsims/scenery#1117. It looks like sun has its own "fire on hold" implementation separate from scenery, so whatever we do there will probably need to be done in sun too.

I would want about a day to solve this problem (3-5 story points?), going into the PressLIstener/FIreListener stack, PushButtonModel/sun stack, and whether the solution needs to support screen reader access may complicate it too.

Ill leave my assignment, I might be able to work on this the second week of this iteration.

@samreid back to you to review, and what is the timeline for CaV?

[samreid]

I think it is OK if enter auto-repeats but spacebar does not. @jessegreenberg what do you recommend? Should we ask the designers if this is acceptable?

[jessegreenberg]

Sure, I'd recommend checking with design team. The difference between enter and spacebar seems OK to me. The fact that the fire interval for enter is so fast is what feels worse to me (holding down for ~1 second kicks all the balls).

[samreid]

In today's discussion, we discussed that sometimes users with motor disabilities will enable "sticky keys" or windows or adjust the firing rate (windows and other platforms), so we think this will be OK. We are also OK that spacebar doesn't repeat. Closing.