1333425 - HTML5's autofocus should be optional for accessibility

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect, P5)

Description

[Mike Gifford]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20161208153507

Steps to reproduce:

Screenreaders should be able to disable autofocus. 


Actual results:

There is no option to do this and screenreaders can't override this behavior in the browser.


Expected results:

You should be able to enable/disable autofocus so it doesn't disrupt the user experience of people with disabilities.

Comment 1

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

Do any browsers today allow diabling of autofocus?

Comment 2

[Mike Gifford]

I am not aware of any browsers that provide this option Marco.  However, there is this from the W3C:

https://w3c.github.io/html/sec-forms.html#autofocusing-a-form-control-the-autofocus-attribute

Use of the autofocus attribute can reduce usability and accessibility for users. Users of assistive technology can be adversively affected, because its use overrides the default behaviour of assistive technology to display content at the top of a document in the viewport, or announce content from the start of the document. Users with cognitive disabilities can also be disorientated by unexpected focus movement upon page load.

User agents should provide a method for users to disable the autofocus attribute behaviour.

Comment 3

[Mike Gifford]

Wanted to add that this can be accessed via:

about:config
browser.autofocus

Just not somewhere that most folks want to venture. This is about making this easier to access.