595000 - Cannot tab to links with or without tabindex attribute on macOS

Status: NEW

(Core :: DOM: UI Events & Focus Handling, defect)

Description

[Scott Rippon]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.6.9
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.6.9

Some of links on the YellowPages.com.au home page have the tabindex attribute.  When I try to tab through all the page links using FF 3.6.9 on Mac OS X 10.5.8 I can only tab between the elements that have the tabindex attributes and the browser chrome fields (address, search, etc.).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load YellowPages.com.au
2. Try to use just the tab key to move through all the links on page.
Actual Results:  
Can only tab between the elements that have the tabindex attributes and the browser chrome fields (address, search, etc.).  Cannot get to the other links on page.

Expected Results:  
The tabindex elements should be first in the tab order then you should be able to tab through all the rest of the tabs on the page.

I tested the YP home page on Firefox 3.6.9 on WinXP and Firefox 3.6.8 on Ubuntu 9.10 and was able to tab through all the links/form fields.  I also tested the page using Google Chrome 6.0.472.55 on Mac OS X 10.5.8 and IE 8.x on WinXP and the tabbing worked correctly.

Accessibility: being able to tab through all the links/form fields on a page is very important to visually impaired (http://webaim.org/articles/visual/blind) and users with a motor impairment (http://webaim.org/articles/motor/motordisabilities).  This is because these users typically just use the keyboard (and the tab key) to navigate the web.

Comment 1

[philip]

This is true of all anchor elements on Mac only. If you go to this fiddle:
http://jsfiddle.net/94328/

on FF Mac (version 10.0) or FF Mac Aurora (version 12.0a2), you'll see that you cannot tab between links, even those with a tabindex of 0.

On Windows, however, I can tab between them just fine.

Comment 2

[Burak Yiğit Kaya [:BYK]]

I was able to reproduce the same behavior at http://jsbin.com/ulumud/5, on yellowpages.com.au and even on Google.com (top bar links are not tabbable).

He is running on Mac OS X 10.8.2 and Firefox 17.0

Comment 3

[Burak Yiğit Kaya [:BYK]]

I was trying to say I was able to reproduce it on a friend's Mac.

Comment 4

[Burak Yiğit Kaya [:BYK]]

This turned out to solve it: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Pressing%20Tab%20key%20does%20not%20select%20menus%20or%20buttons

But the thing is, Chrome works as expected by default so I would say this is an important issue. It just looks broken.

Comment 5

[Albert Scheiner [:alberts]]

Moving this into the same bucket as bug 759922. Both issues seem to follow the same concept on macOS as outlined by Boris in comment #6

On Mac, there is a system preference that controls whether things like images can be tabbed to; by default they cannot.
But I agree that an explicit tabindex should probably override that...

I created a new, little test case: https://codepen.io/scheinercc/pen/qBwLdKo

The question is, should this be closed as a duplicate of bug 759922, or can those two issues be fixed separately?

Note: bug 810591, which also raises the <a> issue, is duplicated against bug 759922. If we keep this one, 810591 should be maybe duplicated here instead.