Orca users can't interact with language selection

[paul-geoghegan]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues and found none matching what I'm reporting.

Bug Description

When using Orca the user can't navigate away from the next button on the language page. This means they can't change their language selection.

Language.screen.mp4

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Start the 25.10 installer,
2. Wait for the language selection screen to be presented,
3. Press super+alt+s to enable Orca,
4. try pressing tab and the arrow keys,
5. Notice that you're stuck on the next button.

Expected behavior

The user should be able to navigate to the list of languages and make a selection.

Ubuntu release

Other (specify in the last field)

What architecture are you using?

amd64

System info

Ubuntu 25.10
Can provide more info if needed.

Additional context

No response

[d-loose]

Keyboard navigation is not very consistent at the moment, but it should be possible to iterate through the language list using the "Up" and "Down" arrow keys after focusing the "Next" button:

2025-10-24.10-30-58.mp4

The focus ends up in a part of the language list that is currently out of the scroll view, so it's quite confusing.

[paul-geoghegan]

@d-loose that's interesting. When I was doing it it was saying nothing. Definitely something we need to fix either way but I'll double check it again.

[paul-geoghegan]

Okay, I checked this out on 25.10 and it works. This is definitely not how it should work though and is definitely quite confusing.

[paul-geoghegan]

I fixed this in this PR. This will also fix an issue with the keyboard page where the same issue was happening since they both use the list widget. There are minimal code changes required. You should just have to remove any references to focusnodes when creating the list. Obviously I'm happy to do it but I just wanted to make a note here incase someone else does it first.