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Thread: Tabpanel visible focus indicator

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From: Laurence Lewis
Date: Fri, Aug 19 2022 5:28PM
Subject: Tabpanel visible focus indicator
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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

From: Mark Magennis
Date: Mon, Aug 22 2022 2:29AM
Subject: Re: Tabpanel visible focus indicator
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I'm with you Lawrence. I think it should have a visible focus indicator purely because it receives focus while tabbing. If the focus indicator suddenly disappears while tabbing you will be left wondering where focus is and you might think there is something important on the page that you can't see. I think this is likely a worse problem than the focus indicator suggesting that you can interact with the panel in some way. You might wonder how you can interact with it and why you would want to but it's not something you're looking to do anyway. Unless it's a scrollable panel of course in which case the indicator is definitely essential.

Mark

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From: WebAIM-Forum < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > On Behalf Of Laurence Lewis
Sent: Saturday 20 August 2022 00:29
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Subject: [EXTERNAL] [WebAIM] Tabpanel visible focus indicator

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