focus

Last month, Heather Migliorisi looked at the accessibility of Smooth Scrolling. In order to do smooth scrolling, you:

1. Check if the clicked link is #jump link
2. Stop the browser default behavior of jumping immediately to that element on the page
3. Animate the scrolling to the element the #jump link pointed to

Stopping the browser default behavior is the part that is problematic for accessibility. No longer does the #jump link move focus to element the #jump link pointed to. So Heather added a #4: move focus to the element the #jump link pointed to.

But moving focus through JavaScript isn't possible on every element. Sometimes you need to force that element to be focusable, which she did through setting tabindex="-1".

(more…)