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Re: Floating "back to top" element -- no keyboard focus

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From: glen walker
Date: Mar 22, 2019 10:20AM

That's a good point. However, since most pages don't have a "back to top"
feature, I don't rely on it. Depending on the browser and screen reader
combination, I just rely on home or ctrl+home, and if that doesn't move my
focus, I use alt+d to move the focus to the address bar and start tabbing
from there. If there is a big header or nav area, then I pray for a skip
link so I can get back to main. I consider that a real world situation
having to work around an inaccessible site. (Although in this case, it's
not literally inaccessible because I can access it from the keyboard. I
just might have to hit tab a zillion times to get back to where I need to
go. So it's accessible but not friendly.)

If "back to top" were the last element in the DOM and I could get my
keyboard focus to it, the next tab stop (ignoring the browser's chrome
[address bar, search field, other focusable items]) would take me to the
first focusable element on the page (hopefully a skip nav) so the "back to
top" element might not save me much time.

Since I usually have plenty of other more serious inaccessible issues to
address, I make "back to top" a low priority thing.

On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 9:52 AM Isabel Holdsworth < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> "Back to top" doesn't necessarily mean the top of the page. It could
> mean the top of the main content, in which case IMO the "Back to top"
> button should be focusable, especially if there's a lot of interactive
> elements in the main content. If not, there's no easy way for keyboard
> users to get the focus back to where that button would presumably
> position it.
>
> Cheers, Isabel
>
>