Microsoft previews tech to ease creation of keyboard-accessible websites
Microsoft has started a preview of technology that eases the task of developing websites with complex navigation elements that don’t need a pointing device to operate.
Patrick Brosset, principal product manager for Microsoft Edge, says the world needs better tools for accessible websites because less than half use tabindex, an HTML attribute that means visitors to a website who press TAB see a highlight, referred to as a “focus”, over a link or interactive control they can use with the ENTER key. Pressing TAB again moves the focus to another link or control. Developers can determine the order in which controls are highlighted each time users press TAB.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) require use of navigation elements like those tabindex enables.
Microsoft’s Brosset thinks tabindex is too hard to use.
“Creating a fully keyboard-accessible site, especially one that has complex widgets such as menus, submenus, toolbars, tabs, and other groups of inputs, isn’t free; it requires a lot of work and knowledge,” he wrote in a Thursday post.
Even developers who are adept at using it, he suggests, “either had to write a lot of complicated code or had to use a JavaScript library. In both cases, you now have more code to maintain, and your website loads more code on startup.”
“This, in turn, impacts the users of your website too. The more code your website needs, the more time it will take for the site to load and become usable,” he lamented.
Microsoft’s fix is tech called “focusgroup” and the company shared it back in 2022. You can find focusgroup here.
“Taking the problem and an early solution to a broad collaborative forum allowed us to mature the focusgroup idea and go through iterations, taking many perspectives into account,” Brosset wrote. “This led to a better, more complete solution for web developers.”
And a solution Microsoft now thinks is ready for wider testing, as Brosset’s post includes an announcement that focusgroup is now available for early testing in Microsoft Edge. As Microsoft contributed its implementation to the Chromium project, developers who use that engine to power other browsers can also take it for a spin.
Jacques Newman, a senior software engineer on Microsoft’s Edge Web Platform Team, posted plenty of detail about focusgroup and how to use it. He’s also looking for feedback.
Many countries have made implementing the principles of WCAG the baseline for complying with anti-discrimination laws, making focusgroup a potentially useful tool for many developers and therefore also for those who need accessible tech. It could also deliver faster web pages for all users, and perhaps also add to the ranks of those who try to keep their hands off pointing devices! ®
