Accessibility/RichContentKeyboardBehaviour: Difference between revisions

The article proposes a model of keyboard navigation through the web page. Technically keyboard navigation can be enabled explicitly, by turning on caret navigation mode, or enabled automatically if the focus goes into editable area.

Keyboard navigation has special meaning for the screen reader users since the keyboard is primary tool they use to traverse the page content. A typical web page may contain rich text, structural elements (like HTML tables) and UI elements so that the content the user deals with is very complex. This makes keyboard navigation behavior not trivial.

Unfortunately there is no specification which defines this behavior. Browser implementations vary and none are perfect. This leads to some portions of the web page aren't accessible by keyboard only. For example it might be not possible to focus UI elements placed within text content while navigating through the page. The rules used to define content navigation when floating and absolute positioned content is met along the way are not clear. This situation coupled with current implementation lowers keyboard navigation appeal and inspires screen reader developers to disable browser provided navigation and implement their own version. Great effort is made by these developers because it is necessary to ensure any presented content is accessible by keyboard.

The goal of this document is to provide guidelines as to how the keyboard navigation should work when the user navigates through mixed content on a page.