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Re: Firefox, about:cofig: "Browse with caret" required for accessibility?

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Jul 17, 2018 5:40AM

On 17/07/2018 11:56, Detlev Fischer wrote:
> A customer suggests I should turn off the flag
> accessibility.browsewithcaret in Firefox' about:config settings so that
> keyboard navigation in the site under test should work. Is that a
> legitimite demand, or can it create accessibility problems for some users?

Browse with caret overrides (of conflicts with) any custom keyboard
handling that may be happening on the page, perhaps.

Caret browsing is needed for keyboard (no AT) users to be able to
arbitrarily move through and select text etc.

If AT was running, AT would be intercepting cursor key commands, unless
role="application" or specific roles (like role="menu" and a correctly
implemented ARIA menu structure) are present. However, pure caret
browsing without AT won't have those specific adaptations of when to act
on cursor keys or when to send the key commands only to the page.

In short, I think the scenario for caret browsing can be problematic.
The customer may be right. But I've no data about how many keyboard
users actually use/need caret browsing on (all the time), or if they
might enable it just when they need to do some arbitrary copy/paste
activity...

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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