Microsoft previews tech to ease creation of keyboard-accessible websites

Microsoft has started a preview of technology that eases the task of developing websites with complex navigation elements that don’t need a pointing device to operate.

Patrick Brosset, principal product manager for Microsoft Edge, says the world needs better tools for accessible websites because less than half use tabindex, an HTML attribute that means visitors to a website who press TAB see a highlight, referred to as a “focus”, over a link or interactive control they can use with the ENTER key. Pressing TAB again moves the focus to another link or control. Developers can determine the order in which controls are highlighted each time users press TAB.

The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) require use of navigation elements like those tabindex enables.

Microsoft’s Brosset thinks tabindex is too hard to use.

“Creating a fully keyboard-accessible site, especially one that has complex widgets ...