tab focus for accessibility enhancement?

[mpoelchau]

• JBrowse version: 1.16.11 and lower
• Web browser being used: Chrome

Hi Jbrowse team,

We recently had an accessibility expert review the tools that we offer for our database, which includes Jbrowse/Apollo. He comments that, for a visual user that can only keyboard navigate, there is a problem with no visible keyboard focus to show the user where they are in some cases. For example, in the attached screenshots of the jbrowse volvox demo there's a visual focus on the 'Go' button on the top right when I tab to it, then I hit tab twice to get the focus on the 'hide/show track titles' icon, but no focus when you click on the tab again multiple times. He was pleasantly surprised that he was able to tab around, so a visual focus on where the tab is would be a useful next step.

Would you be able to consider some improvements along these lines in the future?

Thanks!

Visual focus on 'Go' icon:

Visual focus on 'hide/show' icon:

No visual focus after tabbing again:

[cmdcolin]

This is good to hear that there is some level of accessibility! It is definitely a very complicated front-end app with a lot of dynamic javascript so it is interesting to know that some small changes could help even more.

It may be hard to dedicate too many resources to updating jbrowse 1 as we are pretty busy with jbrowse 2 but we can keep this open

[cmdcolin]

no focus when you click on the tab again multiple times

I guess to be clear, is there an expectation of where the tab should go after that?

[mpoelchau]

Thanks for looking into this! If it happens in Jbrowse2 rather than 1 that would be great, too. I don't think there's an expectation as to where the tab goes, just that wherever it goes is indicated with a visual focus.