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Re: Focus on adding/removing items

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From: Bourne, Sarah (ITD)
Date: Mar 18, 2015 2:56PM

Rob,

Where the focus should go is more a usability issue than an accessibility requirement per se, and may requiring some testing by users to see if you've got it right. As a general rule, you want to put focus back to where the user was in the flow of the page. If it goes to the top of the page, for instance, a keyboard-only user would have to tab all the way back to "items" to continue item management.

Since you can't put them back on the delete button once an item is deleted, perhaps it could be replaced with a confirmation statement (maybe with an un-do action even) that the item was deleted. Lacking that, I would think it should go to the next element - the next item link if there is one, or to the add item button. But user testing might show that taking them to the top of the list when at the end is more useful.

I can't speak to exactly which ARIA attributes you should use, but I agree with Birkir that using list elements for the items would improve usability, and you would need something so the list and count is updated when items have been added or deleted.

sb
Sarah E. Bourne
Director of IT Accessibility, MassIT
Commonwealth of Massachusetts
1 Ashburton Pl. rm 1601 Boston MA 02108
617-626-4502
<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.mass.gov/MassIT