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Re: weird focus behavior

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From: Mike Warner
Date: Apr 25, 2025 12:03PM

Well, this is interesting. As I'm testing a website using a keyboard
without a screen reader, closing a dialog by hitting escape or tabbing to
and activating a close button, the focus returns to the button that opened
the dialog. When using JAWS and NVDA, the focus gets lost and goes to the
body tag. When I have a live expression in the developer console to see the
active element (document.activeElement), I can see clearly that the active
element is the body after closing the dialog. That said, after closing the
dialog, both screen readers announce the dialog opener button and if I do
nothing else, hitting enter right after closing the dialog will open the
dialog again. NVDA's focus indicator also shows that the body tag has the
focus. Hitting the tab key after closing the dialog with NVDA or JAWS
brings me to the skip menu, which is the first focusable element on the
page.

Has anyone else encountered this?

Thanks,
Mike Warner
Director of IT Services
MindEdge Learning