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Why cant i enter something in on a website by using my keyboard?

I am trying to manually enter barcode numbers for our library books on our online school portal, i can use our scanner to enter them but i am not able to manually type them in. I spoke to the support for our school portal and they said it my be something our internet browser is blocking...

I am trying to manually enter barcode numbers for our library books on our online school portal, i can use our scanner to enter them but i am not able to manually type them in. I spoke to the support for our school portal and they said it my be something our internet browser is blocking...

All Replies (7)

Do you know whether the form you are using is an ordinary HTML form like the ones used on this forum, or is a plugin-based solution in Flash or Java? It's easier to troubleshoot ordinary HTML forms...

But first... the forum software detected your Firefox as version 9.0.1. Is that correct?

Version 9 is not secure; Mozilla discloses security flaws after each new release. Is something holding you back from upgrading to Firefox 33? Please let us know so we can suggest solutions or workarounds.

If Help > About Firefox shows Firefox 33.0, you may need to clear the preference that is misreporting your version number. See: How to reset the default user agent on Firefox.

I updated to 33.0 and i am still not able to do it..

If you right-click the box where you're trying to type, do you get an ordinary Firefox context menu or do you get a plugin menu (usually it will indicate Adobe Flash or Java on the menu)?

If it's an ordinary form control, maybe you can take a peek under the hood. Here's what I mean:

Right-click that form control and choose Inspect Element (Q) from the menu. Firefox should open the Inspector at the bottom of the tab and highlight the part of the HTML code for that control. Typically it will be an <input> control.

If it's not an <input>, what is highlighted? It could be something transparent that is blocking you from getting to the control.

If it is an <input>, read across the tag parameters and check for disabled (or disabled="disabled")? If it's there, the site was designed not to allow entry. If it's not there, hmm, maybe a script in the page is set to ignore keyboard input. Hard to say without hands on.

By the way, can you type into that form using Internet Explorer, or does this problem affect IE, too?

When I right click a menu pops up that has options about the page like; home, check in, check out, and back.

Is this page available to the public anywhere, or is it only available to library staff?

Sounds like the page has a custom context menu. There is a setting to pop up Firefox's normal context menu instead of or in addition to the custom menu in order to be able to try out the Inspector.

Here's how you would do that:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste context and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the dom.event.contextmenu.enabled preference to switch it from true to false. Now when you right-click, you should see Firefox's regular right-click menu in front of the site's menu so you can call up the Inspector.

If you keep this setting, to get to the site's menu, you can clear Firefox's menu by tapping the Esc key or Alt key on the keyboard once.