Dear all,

I am using NVDA, Firefox, and Edge (latest stable versions of each but
I have been facing such issues for many months now). Far too
frequently have I been encountering instances wherein Spacebar/Enter
simply does not activate a pressable item (link, button, menu item,
dialog, etc.). Either nothing happens, or the focus jumps in the page
arbitrarily, or a different element in the page is activated, or I am
thrown into another window altogether. This happens on commonplace
websites like Google, LinkedIn, and Doordash as well as less complex
and lesser-known websites. In these cases, I sometimes need to enter
focus mode and retry Spacebar/Enter, sometimes need to manually move
around the navigator object to the control and press
NVDA+Shift+Backspace and then NVDA+Enter, sometimes manually
reposition the navigator object and move the mouse pointer to it and
then simulate a left mouse click, and sometimes try maximizing the
browser's window or closing some other programs whose window may be
interfering (like CCleaner and Google Drive). Even then, sometimes,
none of these strategies succeed. This experience applies to a
minority of pressable elements (<50%), but it is a significant
minority of cases and enough to be a significant inconvenience. I face
this more often in Firefox, but that might be because I use it more
than I do Edge.

I would like to acknowledge that (a) the description of my issue lacks
examples and is somewhat generic, and (b) issues should ideally be
reported on GitHub. This is intentional because in my experience, this
problem is pervasive and issues of this kind have already been
reported on GitHub for months(/years?) to little effect.

Do you face such issues as well? What strategies do you use when
Spacebar/Enter doesn't activate a control like it should? Have you
found one web browser to fare better than another in this respect (say
Edge might be more reliable than Firefox)?

I would be deeply grateful for any thoughts and suggestions.

Kind Regards,
Bhavya Shah
B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science | Stanford '24
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhavyashah125/