WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Logical focus flow on carousel

for

From: Greg Jellin
Date: Apr 2, 2019 11:52AM

Happy spring friends,

I'm not a fan of carousels from any perspective, however I find myself
testing a carousel pattern for a client.

The pattern has standard previous and next buttons to move between
slides. Each slide has some basic content (an image, a heading, a
paragraph).

At the moment, I'm testing using TalkBack for Android. The context is
that I am swiping to navigate forward/backward. My question is, what is
the expected focus behavior when a user has activated the "next" button?
In this case, another swipe forward takes the user out of the carousel
and onto the next element on the page. To get to the now current slide
content the user has to swipe backward (right to left) which sets focus
on the "previous" button, then again to get to the current slide
content, which sets focus at the bottom-most element in the content. The
user has to work backward towards the title of the slide.

This seems to be a common behavior in the wild. including the example on
the WAI tutorials page:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/carousels/working-example/

In my opinion, after activating the next button the next forward swipe
should move the focus to the first element at the top of the now current
slide.

I'd love to hear some opinions on this.

Greg Jellin