Bug: Editor is not Keyboard Accessible

It looks as if focus outlines are suppressed on the editor. I’m able to tab around but I can’t see what’s selected unless I hit return and trigger it.

Unless I have something misconfigured on my browser, this is a big accessibility issue. It’s very bad practice to suppress focus outlines unless you also make the focus state very clear (and even then, best to have the outlines too).

sorry, i’m not quite sure what you are referring to. Can you maybe add a screenshot with a simple annotation to show where the problem is? In general I agree 100% with you and I would be happy to fix this, but I’m not easily able to reproduce it. Thank you!

Here’s a video of the issue. First I click between two editor tabs — no problem there. Then I use the tab and return keys to jump between the editor sections. The navigation works perfectly and in general I think the tab order is well designed — you just can’t see what’s going on because there are no outline states. This is using the latest version of Safari.

Thank you! Yes, we are considering this internally, we’ll be in touch!

@webworkshop we tried adding the outline, but it’s a bit pointless as it’s not very helpful in terms of accessibility while it looks bad in the interface :frowning:

we know we are not very friendly in terms of accessibility, but it’s something that we cannot work on with the team that we have, sorry!

I’m baffled at this response to be honest. What team can’t work on accessibility?! Have you ever made a similar edit to a large number of records in Dato (or another system)? You would not see keyboard navigation as ‘pointless’ if you had!

You don’t have to use browsers’ default outline style if you don’t want to — you already have a hover style for pretty much every control in the interface, so why not just add that as a focus style?

You are right about the focused state!

I was saying pointless in terms of keyboard accessibility in general, as we are surely deficient in many different respects.

If we want to tackle this small aspect then it’s surely doable and useful. We’ll be in touch again soon.

You might be surprised by how usable the editor is from the keyboard already, since for the main part it looks like you’re using standard form elements and links. When I hacked in some focus styles, I was able to tab around quite quickly.

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hey @webworkshop we’ve tried adding some more focused states around. Let us know if you find any additional spots where we can add those!

Thank you for this

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