[whatwg] make <video> always focusable and interactive content

[Charles Pritchard]

IE has lead the way. Thanks for your contributions to the Chrome/WebKit process.

I've setup a webapps-UI CG at the W3C to help track these efforts.

I suspect we'll see more traffic from authors as web components grow out of their development/experimental status in WebKit.



On Jun 19, 2012, at 8:43 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I recently experimented with keyboard accessibility of media elements.
> 
> I found that browsers don't provide a default tabfocus on media
> elements nor do they provide keyboard interactivity. I had to put
> explicit @tabindex attributes onto the media elements to allow them to
> at least receive focus. This is particularly irritating in a
> screenreader.
> 
> As the video is specified right now, it is not a tabfocusable element
> [1] and only interactive [2] when it has controls. This is sufficient
> for audio elements, which have no visual representation without
> controls, but isn't right for video, which always renders at least a
> poster (or a black area). Also, if there are controls specified, they
> should actually be tabfocusable.
> 
> Even video without controls should allow keyboard focus and should
> provide for default keyboard interaction: at minimum it should allow
> for ENTER and/or SPACE to toggle play/pause - and clicking on it
> should work, too. Potentially it should have up/down arrows to change
> the volume and left/right arrows to seek back/forward by e.g. 10sec.
> As it's currently specified, browser cannot provide such interaction
> when there are no controls, since the element is not generally
> specified as an interactive element [2].
> 
> [1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/editing.html#focusable
> [2] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/elements.html#interactive-content-0
> 
> There is also a bug in the W3C wiki for this:
> https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17463
> 
> Cheers,
> Silvia.