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Comment thread actions: hover-only controls and unlabeled buttons in ThreadsSideba

Open Beginner friendly
#2,824 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
72/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
react, typescript
Domain
accessibility, frontend

Research direction

Start in the comments sidebar implementation, focusing on each thread’s comment header and its emoji and options buttons. Verify the controls are reachable by keyboard without mouse hover and that a screen reader announces meaningful labels such as “Add reaction” and “Comment options”; done means both requirements work in the sidebar.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

a11y
What’s broken?

In the comments sidebar, each thread has emoji and options buttons in the comment header. Two issues:

Image

  1. Hover-only controls
    These buttons only appear on mouse hover. Without hovering first, they are not reachable by keyboard (Tab).

  2. Unlabeled buttons
    If buttons are made visible via hover, Tab can reach them but the screen reader announces only bouton with no accessible name:

What did you expect to happen?

Make action buttons keyboard-accessible, always visible in sidebar, or shown on :focus-within, not only :hover.

Add aria-label on emoji and options buttons (e.g. "Add reaction", "Comment options").

Steps to reproduce

Try to reach this icon using only the keyboard.

It doesn’t work unless the icon has first been hovered with the mouse.

BlockNote version

0.51.4

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
10.2k
Forks
772
Avg merge
7d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
19

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