Issue 689213  has been merged into this issue.

This was also reported in Feb 2017 in  issue 689213 :

Chrome Version: 58.0.3004.0 (Official Build) canary(64-bit)
OS: Win10
Screen reader: NVDA 2016.4 and JAWS 18

re accessing bookmarks via first letter (or first letters) navigation.
Could we make Alt+B open the Bookmarks submenu in the Chrome menu, similar to pressing Alt+F, B?
I think this would be an easier solution to implement.
It would also be more predictable. It would be a normal menu not a toolbar with sub-menus and such.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
(1) Using above combo
(2) ALT+B to open the Bookmarks submenu in the Chrome menu
(3) first-letter nav to bookmark

What is the expected result?
ALT+B to open the Bookmarks submenu in the Chrome menu, similar to pressing Alt+F, B

What happens instead?
ALT+B isn't suppored currently, so must use ALT+F, B.

Users have added the following comments via mailing lists:

If I press Alt-F, then B, then go to my folder, then I should use first letter navigation.

I’d like to see a single letter get you to your bookmarks, such as Alt-B or something like that.  Alt-F then B is one more keystroke than IE, and so less efficient, especially if you do it often.

To clarify, the repro in Comment 1 is incorrect. The Bookmarks Manager has full substring searching. If you type "B" it gives you all bookmarks with that letter anywhere. That's WAI.

The real bug here is that all Chrome menus don't have first letter navigation.

Sorry, I'm wrong. First letter navigation works fine in menus, just not in the bookmarks bar.

I think this is actually a feature request - to make Alt+B open the bookmarks submenu.

If there are any other requests, please file separate bugs.

There's also the idea that when searching Bookmarks, typing a letter such as "t" will return all words that contain the letter t. This is different from, say, typing t in the Omnibar which gives you search suggestions starting with the letter t, then after that includes search suggestions that contain the letter t. I think it's this discrepancy in how search results are presented that the user was trying to articulate. 

Please let me know if you'd like me to open that in another bug or if you feel it works as intended and therefore doesn't need another bug. 

I think that's working as intended.

I made a quick patch to make Alt+B open the Bookmarks submenu directly. Let's get UI review for that.

For the record, discussed on chrome-ui-review and approved by ainslie@

What gets priority if a webpage also wants Alt+B? https://support.google.com/docs/answer/179738?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en says that Alt+B is "Table menu" in Docs, for instance.

It's quite unusual to have an accelerator for a nested menu. Is there a reason alt-f followed by 'b' isn't good enough? I do have the same concern that Dan mentions (priority and eating another accelerator that pages may want).

To clarify, we'll launch this on Windows & Linux only.

Can you respond to Scott's question? Do we have other accelerators for nested menus? At least on Chrome OS, Alt+F followed by B seems like a pretty quick way to get to the bookmarks submenu. Is having Alt+B preferable from an a11y perspective? Most of the comments that I see here don't seem to say anything about a11y, and there are other items in the menu for which the same argument can be made (Cast, Settings, etc.).

There have been a few users requests for Alt+B to work specifically, but I agree that it's odd to have an accelerator for a nested menu.

After some discussion we're going to drop this and instead focus on improving keyboard access in the Bookmark manager.

@leberly and @dsexton please file new bugs to improve keyboard access in the Bookmarks Manager, that seems like the best