SUMMARY

I recently discovered a nice feature of Web browsers. One can select a link by searching for its text and hitting escape. Then, hitting Enter opens the link, Ctrl+Enter opens the link in a new tab and Shift+Enter opens the link in a new window. I find this is a nice usability feature and a nice to have for navigating inside PDFs in Okular without the mouse.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Open a PDF with a table of contents.
2. Hit CTRL+F and type a part of a title.
3. The text in a link is highlighted. Hit escape.

OBSERVED RESULT

The search box is closed.

EXPECTED RESULT

1) The search box is closed.
2) If such a thing is possible in Okular, the link is selected (if not, this would be another nice-to-have thing, so (shift+)tab can be used to navigate through links, let me know if I should report another whish here). 
3) Hitting enter activates the link in which the highlighted text is.

I don't know how text search and highlighting are implemented in Okular, but I suspect it could amount to: on Enter pressed, search for the first link in the active highlighted text. If such a link exists, activate it. It would also allow "clicking" on footnotes with the keyboard.