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Re: [EXTERNAL]Unaware of sitemap due to forced focus

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Feb 10, 2021 9:16AM

Ni Barry,

This sounds like quite a common UI pattern. You have a site where each page starts with a common Table of Contents navigation panel containing links to every available page. After that comes the unique page content which starts with an h1 heading. Each page contains a Next page button and a Back button. It sounds like each of your pages may have more than one option for Next page, allowing for different journeys, but I don't think that's important. Is that a correct description of your site?

Three questions are:
1. On each page transition, should focus be moved to the page heading?
2. If so, does it matter that the common Table of Contents comes before the page heading in the reading order?
3. Does the fact that this is a single page application rather than a set of separate URLs matter?

Question 2 is the one you asked but I think questions 1 and 3 are also important.

As Wolfgang has said, it's not normally a good idea when a new page loads to place focus anywhere other than the top of the page. However, it may be appropriate if the user is engaged in a predictable workflow where you can predict with certainty what they will want to read or interact with and this is quite distant from the top of the page or cumbersome to navigate to. In your case, the user has chosen to go to a particular next page for their journey, so it seems unlikely that they will want to use the Table of Contents. So moving focus seems reasonable. And I don't think it does matter that the Table of Contents comes before the page content in the reading order because the user will have encountered it on reading through the page when it first loaded so they will know where it is. So the answers to question 1 and 2 are, in my opinion, Yes and No.

Question 3 is pertinent though. Because there is no URL change, it will appear to a screen reader user that they have just jumped somewhere else on the page. But in fact, all the other content has been removed. So I think you need to ask yourself: How does the user know this? Might it cause problems or confusion if they don't.

Mark