Re: Potential failure technique for WCAG 2.1 SC 2.5.6 - Concurrent Input Mechanisms

HI Brooks,

Interesting question, let me get a couple of things straight in my head:

> A sighted web page user tabs with a keyboard … then she arrows down in the dropdown list

Are you assuming that there is scripting for arrowing down the list, or do you mean she tabs down? Or is she also using a screenreader? This might not matter for the overall question, it just jumped out at me.


> must the web page content allow for both the keyboard focused option and the mouse hovered option to display visual focus indicators simultaneously?

Pedantically, the mouse-hover isn’t a “focus” indicator, which might have a bearing here.

SC 2.5.6 doesn’t include any requirement for focus/hover indicators, it is phrased as “does not restrict use of input modalities”, so you could (theoretically) hide any mouse-hover indicators if the user has tabbed through the page, so long as the functionality still worked. I.e. you could click on the menu and it works.
Not advised, but possible.


> Is being able to see where keyboard input focus was last positioned on the page a requirement for being able to use a keyboard at any time, even if the user has hovered over the page with a mouse since the last keyboard maneuver?

Not exactly, the requirement would be for the current focus to be apparent, but you could have hover-styles as well, at the same time. I think we have to assume that people know where their mouse is, so duplicate styles (if focus & hover have the same styles) are ok.

There are also circumstances where the focus can be changed by clicking with a mouse. E.g. you click on a correctly coded label and the focus would be placed in the input.

By default I don’t think that mouse-hover affects (keyboard) focus, you’d have to do some pretty strange scripting to achieve that. Is that the case you’re dealing with?

If it’s a drop-down/fly-out menu, I’d try and align mouse-click with keyboard-activate, but keep mouse-hover and keyboard-focus both active at the same time.
E.g. The menu opens with click/activate, you can tab through and activate, or click with a mouse at any time. Also, keyboard focus should be apparent, and allow hover to be triggered as well.

-Alastair