Re: Best practice for aria-disabled and keyboard focus management

Moving to public-pfwg.

Disabled controls are not focusable on any platform UI that I know of. VoiceOver allows navigation to disabled controls for the cases Bryan mentioned, but full keyboard access (Tab navigation) does not. I think ARIA-based controls should behave the same way as standard keyboard interaction. If assistive technologies wish to provide additional navigation mechanisms, they may do so.

Please feel free to suggest spec changes to reflect this.


On May 20, 2014, at 10:18 AM, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com> wrote:

> Is this general?
>  
> I can see the benefit of having disabled buttons not be in the tab order, however when arrowing within menus it’s often useful to know which menu items are disabled as within standard menus.
>  
> From: Gunderson, Jon R [mailto:jongund@illinois.edu] 
> Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 7:20 AM
> To: W3C WAI-PFWG
> Cc: W3C WAI-XTECH
> Subject: Best practice for aria-disabled and keyboard focus management
>  
> The aria spec seems a little vague where disabled controls should be focusable.
>  
> Is the best practice to make the container widget focusable (the widget in tab order) and disable focus moving to children of the  parent widget.
>  
> The coding pattern being proposed is that the disabled control is discoverable through the tab order, but more complex keyboard interaction is disabled until the form control is enabled.
>  
> Jon