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Re: weird focus behavior

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Apr 28, 2025 1:06AM

Mike,

Whenever I come across something happening after a screen reader interaction with a control that doesn't happen without the screen reader running, I always check what happens using the mouse. Screen readers sometimes fire mouse and pointer events (mouseUp MouseDown, pointerUp, pointerDown, click) when you press the Enter or Space key to activate a control. In your example, the developers may have added tried to fix the keyboard focus behavior by moving focus to the dialog opener button when the Space and Enter keys are used to close the dialog . But they may not be catching the click events that the mouse (and possibly the screen reader) is generating. Worth looking at.

Mark


From: WebAIM-Forum on behalf of Mike Warner via WebAIM-Forum
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2025 19:03
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Cc: Mike Warner
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [WebAIM] weird focus behavior

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