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Previous and Next buttons on HTML forms

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From: Wloch, Rob
Date: Apr 10, 2015 9:49AM

Hello,

Just wondering if anyone on this forum has dealt with the following issue regarding the use of Previous, Next buttons on HTML forms.

Our organization has decided that "Previous" should visually be on the left and "Next" on the right because it makes intuitive sense in terms of logical flow and follows the same paradigm as the links at the bottom of a Google search results page for example.

The problem is that it makes the "Previous" button the first submit button after the form which means that it will be triggered by default if the user hits ENTER anywhere in the form. To get around that, we made "Next" come before "Previous" and used CSS to visually swap the buttons but now the expected focus order is illogical when tabbing through the buttons because it skips over one button and then goes back which I believe may be a violation of WCAG 2.0 SC 2.4.3.

Here's an interesting survey related to this topic in case you're interested:
https://surveypractice.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/navigation-buttons/

Thank you, Rob.