Messages from previous editors on 2.4.7 focus visible

Hi All

After our discussion last week about 2.4.7 I took the liberty of contacting
the two previous chairs of WCAG 2.0 to get their recollections of 2.4.7 and
whether it applies to layered content where focus is temporarily obscured
behind a layer. Here is my question to them with their answers.

===David MacDonald's question===

There is a very animated WCAG discussion on the working group about SC 2.4.7
<https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/focus-visible.html> focus
visible,


Any keyboard operable user interface has a mode of operation where the
keyboard focus indicator is visible.


The group has no consensus about whether it was intended to cover the
scenario where the user tabs to a component which is behind a
sticky header/footer etc, and is temporarily obscured, but if the user
scrolls (or presses the spacebar) the component becomes visible with its
focus ring visible.
My sense was that if the component can be shown with a simple action like
scrolling and the focus ring is correctly implemented, then the SC would be
met... but it's quite a dynamic discussion.

I'm wondering about your thoughts about that which would help provide
context.

=== Loretta Guarino Reid (PhD Computer Science), WCAG 2.0 chair and
accessibility at Google ===

Nice to hear from you! I hope all is well with you and yours.

This is a very different question from the sorts of things I remember us
discussing. The use of layers of UI elements and regions was not common
then, and we were more focused on making sure you could find the focused
element in the two-dimensional area of the window.

I'm not sure what I think the answer should be, either. For someone with
low vision, having the focus highlight (and focused element) completely
obscured poses real challenges. But how could such situations be avoided in
the 2.5 dimensional world we find ourselves in? Would there need to be some
user agent support for rearranging the top layer to uncover the focused
item? How would the user know what to do? Yet, I can't see the web going
back from these design patterns.

No wonder this has lead to extended discussion!

I'm afraid I am not being much help, but this is certainly an interesting
problem to think about.

====== Gregg Vanderheiden (PhD Engineering, former WCAG 1 and WCAG 2
chair)  ====
Here is another one for the history books.  (That is — the place where they
archive all the history and lost information on the guidelines.    They
created one a while ago.  Do you know where it is?)

MY MEMORY
What we WANTED to say was that “the Keyboard focus indicator was highly
visible”.   But that is not testable.    So we went with “visible” and used
that as an anchor to provide advisory notes that the focus indicator should
be highly visible — that is — visible from 10 times the normal viewing
distance or more.

So as it is - - it is pretty hard to not meet it - unless you do something
crazy and don’t make the keyboard focus indicator visible at all — in which
case it is not a keyboard focus indicator….   That is - you don’t have one
at all.

===David's Summary ====

- It was not the WCAG Working Group's intention when creating SC 2.4.7 to
address layered content where a properly coded focus ring is
temporarily obscured but can be shown by scrolling.
- SC 2.4.7 wording doesn't apply to layered content,
- There is no historical precedence to interpret it that way.
- There may be good reason to look at this as a new requirement for
WCAG.NEXT, but layering is here to stay and this goes well beyond the
question of sticky headers and footers, and is likely something that
should be addressed at the browser level

The institutional memory homepage is here
https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/WCAG20/Institutional_Memory There is no
content in there for 2.4.7.

I would add that in 20 years this is the first time it's been asked to us
that I'm aware of. The request was from a power tester and not an end user.
My guess for the reason we've not heard about it from end users, is the way
the sighted keyboard users interact with content. I cover that in this blog
entry.
https://www.davidmacd.com/blog/sighted-keyboard-only-user.html

Cheers,
David MacDonald



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