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

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