Spacebar no longer works as "submit" action in Identify modal

Bug Reports
1

Platform: Windows+MacOS

Browser: Firefox + Chrome tested

Description of problem: Spacebar no longer works as a keyboard shortcut to save IDs in Identify modal - to reproduce:

Step 1: Go to Identify modal and select an observation

Step 2: Hit I to "I"dentify, enter a taxon, hit Tab twice to reach “Save” button

Step 3: Press Spacebar - expected/previous behavior was that the ID is saved, now nothing happens

This seems to be a recent change, within the last few weeks or so. Firefox is my primary browser, but I also tried in Chrome and found the same behavior, so I don’t think it is a browser issue as such. I also tested some other websites and found that spacebar works as expected. On iNat it still works in other places, such as the “Done” button for submitting comments/IDs on observation pages. But not in the identify modal.

Most of my iNat activity is IDing. Over the years I have trained myself to efficient, so I can review as many observations as possible in a given amount of time. So, keyboard shortcuts are important and there is a lot of muscle memory involved here. “Enter” still works and of course you can still click the button, so this may seem trivial - but this has sorta broken my routine for identifying on iNat. Again, muscle memory.

There was a previous feature request to implement CTRL+Enter (or CMD+Enter on Mac) as a “submit” action, but it was declined because users can still use Enter/Space and that shouldn’t be too onerous.

I don’t imagine this was an intentional change, but I would appreciate any input on this from anyone. Thanks!

2

We recall seeing within the past day that the space bar was added as the keyboard shortcut for playing an audio recording in an observation (such as when identifying):

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/on-the-identification-screen-create-a-shortcut-key-to-play-the-first-sound-file-for-the-observation/30156/5

Could this be why?

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3

UGHHHHHH. Yeah, that’s gotta be it. I verified the keyboard shortcuts are triggered while the “Save” button is highlighted, so that must be what’s happening. That sucks, as it means it won’t be “fixed,” - so I will have to try and edit years of muscle memory, or just stop making IDs in any volume. Appreciate the reply!

edit: Guess I will mark this as Solved… but appreciate if anyone has any thoughts other than “change your established behavior” :)

2 Likes
4

I believe that the play sound shortcut was a feature request on the forum that was approved.

I don’t have experience with it, but I think that there are browser extensions that allow custom keymapping. I’ve heard other volume IDers talk about using these I think, but don’t know about it myself. You could try searching the forum or making a post asking others if they use keymapping if that is something you’d be interested in.

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