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Re: Reg focus management for web application screen/layout changes.

for

From: Ryan Hemphill
Date: Aug 4, 2012 8:20AM

This is a very interesting question. One of the things that this brings up
is the need to consider the fact that the popup (also called "modal") can
be used for a large variety of content - pretty much all the content that
you would see in a normal web page.

It is for this reason that I feel pretty strongly that you should be
handling your modal window content the same way you would focus on a normal
page, but let the user know about the focus change. I know there are
others that feel differently about this, but I would ask those that object
to take a look at the different ways that modal windows are being used out
in the wild these days. I think you will find that it demonstrates the
diversity I was referring to.

I think the most important thing, Ramya, is to let the user know that a
focus change has occurred, drop it at the top of the dialog/popup/modal and
give them a sense of where they have jumped to and the nature of the
content. I would also like to mention that while you might be tempted to
drop focus on a heading at the top of your popup, which would make sense -
don't. JAWS has a bug in 10, 11 and 12(not sure about 13) that will cause
it to read off as an empty text field.

With that, I'm off to vacation land. Have a good weekend, all!

Ryan

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Ramya Sethuraman < <EMAIL REMOVED>
> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> My question is about focus management for web accessibility. When we launch
> a popup/dialog, does focus always need to go to the first focusable element
> for accessibility reasons or is it acceptable to set focus on an element
> that we think the user is more likely to want to work with?
>
> For example, if a dialog starts with an input field and a cancel link
> followed by a dropdown and we think the user would most likely want to work
> with the dropdown when the dialog loads, is it ok to set focus on the
> dropdown element? In this case, how would the user know about the previous
> focusable elements existing on the dialog? But, if the dropdown is where
> 80% of the users will want to be when the dialog is launched, it doesn't
> make much sense placing focus on the initial input field...
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ramya
> > > >



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