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

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!

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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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” :)

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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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