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Re: Should disabled elements receive tab focus

for

From: Ajay Sharma
Date: Nov 1, 2016 10:02AM

Hello, a sin sear thanks to all for sharing your views, this has
certainly helped in understanding the impact of disabled elements in
variety of scenarios.

Also, recently came across few instances e.g. MS Office online, where
tab focus goes on disabled elements such as undo, redo, copy paste
etc, which are disabled by default in a new document, and same is the
case with native desktop apps.

So, came up with following conclusion,

1.Disabled interactive control should not be in tab order, except for
some complex applications / scenarios, where it's certainn that
keeping that particular element out of the tab order would confuse the
AT user.
2.Disabling the submit button on the forms should be avoided to handle
errors / validations.
3. In case of desktop apps, disabled elements should be focusable as
here it's not as easy to navigate with reading keys as in web with
browse mode.

Please let me know if above assumptions are good enough to build an
accessibility policy for a product.

Best Regards,
Ajay

On 10/29/16, Mallory < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> " So the low vision user is forced to try and figure out what in the
> form is needed to make that disabled control enabled so they can read it
> only to find out it wasn't something they wanted anyway."
>
> This would be a case where designers, developers, info architects ought
> to be coming up with better ways of getting necessary information to the
> user. Or, if the necessary info is only in a faint disabled control,
> that means something to fix.
>
> Though yeah, we often don't have the above luxury :)
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 28, 2016, at 06:42 PM, Sailesh Panchang wrote:
>> Designers / developers need to review when it makes sense to include
>> disabled controls in the UI. For instance in the page navigation
>> links, the 'Next' button can be disabled and yet be rendered visually
>> when the last page is in view. It becomes conspicuous by being absent
>> in the tab order then!
>> On the other hand dependent controls generally should be hidden if
>> they are disabled. It makes for a cleaner uncluttered UI for everyone.
>> Please review
>> http://www.mindoversight.com/csun/2016/Overview.html
>> and example for poor design- disabled controls.
>> Thanks,
>> Sailesh
>>
>>
>> On 10/28/16, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>> >> So in the situation where there are two combo-boxes and a submit button
>> >> on
>> >> a page, and the second combo box has no choices until the first combo
>> >> box
>> >> has a selection made would you want that second combo to be in the tab
>> >> order? We were talking about adding a aria-disabled to the second combo
>> >> box until there are choices in the it, would make more sense to mark it
>> >> completely disabled?
>> >
>> > I'd say it is best practice to advise the user that changing something
>> > in a
>> > control will affect/change or add content later/further in the document.
>> >
>> > Jonathan
>> >
>> > Jonathan Avila
>> > Chief Accessibility Officer
>> > SSB BART Group
>> > <EMAIL REMOVED>
>> > 703.637.8957 (Office)
>> >
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>> >
>> >