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Tabpanel visible focus indicator

for

From: Laurence Lewis
Date: Aug 19, 2022 5:28PM

In the ARIA Practice Guide under the Accessibility Features heading it says

"To make it easy for screen reader users to navigate from a tab to the
beginning of content in the active tabpanel, the tabpanel element has
tabindex="0" to include the panel in the page Tab sequence. It is
recommended that all tabpanel elements in a tab set are focusable if there
are any panels in the set that contain content where the first element in
the panel is not focusable."

I normally do not have a visible focus indicator for non-active elements
that receive focus. However, with the Tabpanel being in the Tab order of
the page via tabindex=0, even though there is no onClick event handler, I
feel that this should have a visible focus indicator when a user presses
the Tab key on the keyboard on a Tab Role and lands on the Tabpanel.

I am interested in what best practice is for this and reasons why a visible
focus indicator is needed, or not.


Laurence Lewis
Senior Accessibility Specialist - Telstra, Brisbane QLD Australia