Links with href attributes not keyboard-focusable

[hirusi]

I am testing this with my site and none of the links are keyboard-focusable. This is in contrast to upstream (Chromium) which handles this just fine. A quick GIF to illustrate Chromium's behaviour:

On Vivaldi, nothing happens at all. I simply keep toggling the address bar focus on and off by pressing Tab.

An answer on StackOverflow details how a link with a href element should be keyboard focusable. Given upstream also treats this correctly, why the difference in behaviour with Vivaldi?

Version details:

Chromium: 83.0.4103.116 (Developer Build) built on Debian bullseye/sid, running on Debian bullseye/sid (64-bit)
Vivaldi: 3.2.1967.47 (Stable channel) (64-bit)
OS: Pop!_OS 20.04 LTS running GNOME on X Window System

[Pesala]

@hirusi Keyboard navigation works fine on your site using Vivaldi Snapshot on Windows, but not with the Stable build.

None of the links there or on this page open with Enter when focused with keyboard navigation.

[Pathduck]

@hirusi Welcome to the Vivaldi Community
Kudos for thinking about accessibility, not enough web developers do this!

I believe I can confirm the problem, and that it works fine in other browsers, Firefox, Opera, Chrome. Using Win 10.

Actually I think this started happening some versions ago, and it used to work. Some time ago keyboard nav with Tab broke.

In Vivaldi there is Spatial Navigation of course, so I rarely have use for tabbing, but most would expect it to work like that. In addition, the settings under Keyboard are a really confusing as to what they mean.

@Pesala It's curious that you say it works for Snapshot, I just tested with it. What are your settings under Keyboard?

[Pesala]

@Pathduck These are my shortcuts:

Single-key shortcuts and Focus All Control are enabled.

[Pathduck]

@Pesala Ah yes, but we're talking about Tab-navigation here, not Spatial Nav. Because that's the standard way of navigating pages in other browsers without spatnav.

I'm trying to go back in history to figure out when it broke, because I'm pretty sure it used to work. Or maybe it's always been kind of wonky and no-one's noticed?

A good test is a basic FTP dir listing:
https://ftp.sunet.se/
Try this in Vivaldi compared to Firefox, Opera.

I don't think the settings under Keyboard should apply to page navigation, but UI navigation?

[Pathduck]

@Gwen-Dragon Aha - I knew there was something I'd missed

Couple things:

• This really belongs in Keyboard settings, not Web Pages...
• Why on earth isn't this the default? It's what new users would expect. Yes, we have Spatial Nav but Tab-nav can co-exist just fine with it.

[hirusi]

Let me acknowledge how responsive and helpful this thread has been!

I agree this should be a default. That is a discussion best left to folks like you who understand Vivaldi inside out. As a user, I would expect this to just work.

I have updated the settings on my end, but I would hope something comes of this. Maybe an FAQ at the bare minimum?

[andi1984]

@Gwen-Dragon Sorry, I do not want to be rude, but can you explain why Vivaldi, as a browser vendor, decided to go as a default against the W3C Standard recommendations?

Modulo platform conventions, it is suggested that the following elements should be considered as focusable areas and be sequentially focusable:

a elements that have an href attribute
(Source: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#the-tabindex-attribute)

So why do we, the users, need to make feature request for something that is already recommended as a default from the W3C?

I see that there does not seem to be a hard requirement to consider <a> elements with href as focusable area, but I would be interested in a statement why the default has been choosen as it is right now.

In the meantime I will file a feature request for it.

Best regards,

Andreas

[andi1984]

Feature request is this one: https://forum.vivaldi.net/topic/51633/links-with-href-attribute-are-focusable-per-default

[andi1984]

Bugreport is VB-73381

[andi1984]

@Gwen-Dragon said in Links with href attributes not keyboard-focusable:

Bug was rejected as feature can be achieved in Vivaldi Setting > Webpages by activating "Focus all Controls and Links".

Well, I can partly understand that this is not "a bug". Even more important that we get the feature request more popular to send a signal that this is something worth to change and important for the users.

Anything else I should do?

[WizardDresden42]

I think there actually is still a bug here because the "Focus All Controls" setting is available under both Keyboard and Webpages (and it seems that only the "Webpages" setting works).

Here's how I found this: I was testing a web application that I built and noticed that the "tab" key was only cycling through buttons. I checked in Firefox and Chrome and it worked as expected. So I checked the "Full Keyboard Access" setting under "Keyboard" and it was set to "Focus All Controls." I only realized that the same setting is also available under "Webpages" after discovering this thread. I checked that setting and it was set to "Focus Forms Only." When I changed it to "Focus All Controls," I was able to tab through links as well.

Obviously, this is confusing and should be consolidated to a single setting.

Keyboard:

Webpages:

(Also, I hadn't really tried the spatial navigation before this--it's pretty awesome)

[WizardDresden42]

@Gwen-Dragon Bug reported!