Re: Focus indicators for grouped controls

On 16/10/2019 18:30, Mitchell Evan wrote:
> As much as I like bright-line criteria, a definition of focus should be 
> based on user experience, not on platform-specific features like 
> document.activeElement. Otherwise we'll neglect a variety of *input 
> modalities* and *UI patterns*.
> 
> Focus tells users:
> 
>   * Where am I in [sequential navigation]? and
>   * What am I interacting with? 

Yes, for the normative definition of "focus", of course I wasn't 
suggesting we jump straight into talking about document.activeElement. 
But somewhere (maybe a note in the definition - but definitely, I would 
suggest, in some normative place rather than just an understanding 
document), we need to clarify that focus may well be different from the 
very platform-specific concepts like document.activeElement, 
particularly in cases that implemented their own custom keyboard/focus 
handling (such as widgets with aria-activedescendant, or some completely 
custom handling).

i.e. when we mean focus, we mean the abstract/high-level definition, and 
we're not limiting this to just saying "the thing that has 'focus' in 
the 'it's document.activeElement' sense"

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke

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Received on Wednesday, 16 October 2019 19:11:53 UTC