keyboard focus questions regarding a news site

Hello,



I have a couple questions about keyboard focus on a journalism news site. I wasn’t able to resolve the questions from online sources, including the W3C site, so really appreciate your input.



Question 1: Focus order

On a journalism news site, can there be an exception to the left to right focus order rule when the main story (called the centerpiece, H1) is in the center of the page between 2 columns of lesser stories? Having the main centerpiece story be the first focus target follows the focus order rule regarding order of importance but it isn’t compliant with the other rule to go Left to Right. Also, the site is adaptive so on mobile, changing the focus order to Left to Right would put the centerpiece story below the smaller stories and it’s important the main story appear first.


Question 2: Alt text and focus target

I am looking for clarity on the relationship or interdependencies between focus order and screen readers, specifically for images with a headline. Can the image and headline be grouped as a single focus target and not impact the image alt text being read by screen readers? Ideally, it would be nice to group the image and head together as the same focus target so a keyboard user can click once for a given story with image. Is there a correlation that would require the image and head be a separate focus? And just to confirm, the image does not need to be in focus to have the alt text read.




Thank you for your expertise and helping us stay compliant.


Char Easter
UX Designer at The Seattle Times
p: 206.464.2945
e: ceaster@seattletimes.com
m: 206.779.2427

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