Dialog: contain focus within dialog

[Scott González]

When tabbing through dialogs, focus should stay within the dialog, even for non-modal dialogs.

See ​jquery-ui-dev thread.

[Scott González]

Related tickets: #4025 #5763 #5764 #6101

[Scott González]

#6647 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[tibi7000]

This should also work for dialogs containing iframes.

[fofanafi]

Focus still goes out of dialog with jQuery UI 1.8.11:

​http://jsbin.com/adika3/3

[Scott González]

#3350 is a duplicate of this ticket.

[techtangents]

When tabbing through dialogs, focus should stay within the dialog, even for non-modal dialogs.

Even for non-modal dialogs? Really? If so, how does a keyboard-only user navigate focus from a non-modal dialog to other controls on the page?

[techtangents]

So, ​http://jsbin.com/opapu3/3 shows that tabbing stays within a modal dialog (jquery-ui 1.8.9).

I say we close this ticket.

[Scott González]

You would move between widgets that contain focus via F6. See ​http://dev.aol.com/dhtml_style_guide#dialognonmodal

[conradirwin]

This is not fixed — it's relying on Firefox's non-standard behaviour of generating a keypress event for the <tab> between elements. Instead the event should be attached to keydown.

[Scott González]

Replying to conradirwin:

This is not fixed — it's relying on Firefox's non-standard behaviour of generating a keypress event for the <tab> between elements. Instead the event should be attached to keydown.

I'm not sure what your comment is about; nobody ever said this was fixed.

[CloudStrife]

I don't really care much about the way it is described in this particular ticket, but I do care about the details described in #6647, which I think is a much more complete description. I hope that this ticket is not closed until the issue described there is fixed.

[julienw]

Hi,

I recently wrote this jQuery plugin exactly to resolve this problem : ​https://github.com/julienw/jquery-trap-input

I thought that it could be either integrated into jQuery UI or externally used if found (like with bgiframe).

I think the main problems are resolved now. I made an example page with a jQuery UI Dialog to be able to compare between the current behaviour and the behaviour I wanted : ​http://julienw.github.com/jquery-trap-input/examples/dialog.html

As I see it, the only left problem is with images and usemap; I don't know a way to focus a map with Javascript. And it's the keyboard focus is very broken in some browsers too (ie, Chrome), especially when two images share the same map (ie: Firefox).

Comments welcome.

[julienw]

Bug #3123 was fixed in August 2011, this makes at least the behaviour consistent accross browsers.

[lukepage]

There are 2 problems I have found in the current implementation.

1. Blurring tab focus (by clicking in empty space) resets the tab index to the document and pressing tab again means you are now focussed behind the modal dialog.

I solved this myself by adding a focus event to the first tabbable thing in the page

2. the :tabbable pseudo selector still looks at all parents that are hidden. But this includes elements that take up no space, so if you have a parent element that takes no space it is possible to have something tabbable that is not being picked up by the tabbable class. In my case our designer had an inline div containing a floated block element - though I'm sure its possible to create with floats without it being invalid.

[southerd]

For non-modal dialogs, focusing outside the dialog is normal behavior, and tabbing should proceed normally. Once focus has gotten back inside the dialog, tabbing should continue only within the dialog. So, 1) is correct behavior for non-modal.

For modal dialogs, focusing outside the dialog followed by tabbing should get the focus back into the dialog; it currently does not.

[southerd]

The :tabbable bug is an instance of ​http://bugs.jqueryui.com/ticket/8643 and will be fixed on that.

[southerd]

Fixed, as demoed in ​http://jsfiddle.net/southerd/FRp2e/

​https://github.com/DavidSouther/jquery-ui/tree/3768_Dialog_Tab

[Scott González]

Tickets need to stay open until merged into master.

[David Souther]

Dialog: Prevent tabbing off any dialog. Fixes #3768 - Dialog: contain focus within dialog.

Changeset: 3a09a4a0de1f485a63091ffe8188b080a561b592