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

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Jul 19, 2018 4:23AM

On 19/07/2018 10:42, Mallory wrote:
> Why not let users turn it on and off as needed with f7? People who use caret nav experience right off the bat that it's generally not on by default. People who need it for stuff like text selection have to learn somewhere which browsers can even do it and how to turn it on.

But I think the core question here was: if a site doesn't work when
caret browsing is on, is that a failure (of WCAG in general, or more
generally of accessibility).

If a site relies in some way on cursor key use, and caret browsing
"steals" the cursor keys (or perhaps even worse, moves the caret BUT
also passes on the keypress to the page which then triggers JS there),
there's going to be problems. When AT is running, AT will disambiguate
whether it needs to react to cursor keys itself (by moving the
reading/accessibility focus) OR just pass on the keystroke to the page
(e.g. when inside a proper role="menu")...but I suspect pure caret
browsing without AT doesn't do anything clever like that, so things will
get funky. Whose fault is it? The browser's, the author's? I tend to
think it's the browser's, in this case...

> I only turn it on when I want to do specific things because otherwise, at least on this machine (Ubuntu on a Thinkpad) it messes with page scrolling.
>
> cheers,
> Mallory
>
> On Tue, Jul 17, 2018, at 11:00 PM, glen walker wrote:
>> I agree with Patrick. Additionally, anytime you turn on or off some
>> feature that is useful for one person but problematic for another, you get
>> into a lose-lose situation. It's best left for the user to decide if they
>> want that feature on or off.
>>
>> Glen
>> >> >> >> > > > > >


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Patrick H. Lauke

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