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Re: Tabbing and the hover event

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Oct 2, 2008 4:30PM

Mike Osborne - AccEase wrote:

> One site www.national.org.nz <http://www.national.org.nz/>; uses CSS-style
> dropdown menus (no Javascript) in the main menu bar. One of our testers is a
> keyboard-only tester (no mouse) and was asking if there was a key
> combination that would initiate the dropdown. Are there any?
>
>
>
> It occurred to me that when using the tab key to navigate from link to link,
> shouldn't the browser be firing the hover event (the link has focus)? I
> think this would be quite useful - then any hover highlighting would be
> available to keyboard users - not just the hard-to-see dotted outline you
> get with a link in focus now. Is this a good idea? If the browser can fire
> an event to display an outline, it can't be that hard to also fire the hover
> event. Any browser developers out there care to comment?

Simple answer: hover events (both in javascript and the :hover CSS
pseudoclass) are only triggered by mouse/pointing device hovering. You
need to double them up with focus events (onfocus="", watching out for
the "focus" event, and/or using :focus CSS pseudo).

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
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Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
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