Bug 112968 – FKA: mouse click on buttons causes focus (document.activeElement) to be lost

• Component: Accessibility
• Status: RESOLVED CONFIGURATION CHANGED

[James Craig]

REPRO *
1. Load attached test case.
2. Tab so that focus is on one of the buttons.
3. Perform a mouse click on the same button. (Notice focus ring disappears.)
4. Press Tab again. (focus has been lost and resets to the beginning of the document)

Note: It's probably okay to "hide" the focus pseudo-state when switching to a mouse, but Tabbing should cause focus to come back to the same element rather than losing document.activeElement entirely.

[James Craig]

Created attachment 194349 [details]
test case demonstrating bug

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/13477257>

[James Craig]

See expected behavior in Firefox 19 for Mac.

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/13477269>

[Alexey Proskuryakov]

See also: bug 22261.

[James Craig]

<rdar://problem/13477257>

[Mu-An Chiou]

Any updates on this? I see that there's not been any changes since the bug was reported 5 years ago. This issue makes building custom widget with focus management very tricky.

[James Craig]

Relating to the newer :focus-visible tracker in bug 225148

[Manuel Rego Casasnovas]

Very related bug, see bug #229895.

[Mu-An Chiou]

Just talked about this at TPAC with ntim and jcraig I just want to add to the repro steps:

REPRO *
1. Load attached test case.
2. Tab so that focus is on one of the buttons.
3. Perform a mouse click on the same button. (Notice focus ring disappears.)
4. Press Tab again. (focus has been lost and resets to the beginning of the document)

As of 16.6, step 4 is no longer the case. the next focus point does land on the button. However if you do `setInterval(() => console.log(document.activeElement), 1000)` to observe the current focused element, you would see that after step 3, the activeElement goes back to body.

nTim mentioned that there has been a recent fix to account for how button[tabindex=0] should be click-focusable like div[tabindex=0]. https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/12743

Now that :focus-visible is implemented, I wonder if WebKit would mind reconsidering this special treatment (https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/b38121da42a0483fdb1bc13782f1c7a8059de100/Source/WebCore/html/HTMLFormControlElement.cpp#L255C13-L255C13) to buttons?

[James Craig]

Seems reasonable to me... When I filed this back in 2013, :focus-visible didn't exist so there wasn't a way to make this work for all use cases, but I think that wwide support of :focus-visible now unblocks this, right?

[James Craig]

Seems fixed in latest STP so this was probably resolved along with :focus-visible. Muan, if you know of other instances where this doesn't work, will you open a new issue?