Cannot get keyboard focus on marker to open popup, or trigger a command

[sirleech]

One cannot get keyboard focus to activate a marker. However, you can access the close button of an already open popup with the keyboard.

Accessibility issue.

[mourner]

Agreed, there should be a way to deal with markers with a keyboard.

[mgifford]

Surely http://energy.gov/maps/ must have dealt with this. It's great that in 0.4 that you can zoom in/out & move the focus, but surely one should be able to focus on a marker to popup.

[emartinez-usgs]

I haven't tried this, but generally, setting a tabIndex attribute on a DOM element will make it focusable. Getting the order correct could be a bit tricky since maps generally exist within the context of larger web page and Leaflet probably shouldn't mangle the whole tab order.

The entire map and all its components could share a common tabIndex value. And then

Elements that have identical tabindex values should be navigated in the order they appear in the character stream

This common tabIndex property could default to some value and be configurable by the user at construction time. All "focusable" components in the map should then share this value.

Just a thought.

[mourner]

Yeah, this can be implemented easily but poses an interesting accessibility problem... If the number of markers is too high, people will have big trouble tabbing through all the markers to get to other elements of a page. So while it certainly needs to be configurable, I'm not sure whether to turn it on by default or not.

[mgifford]

Adjusting the tabindex often causes other problems. There are ways to do it, but often it's done incorrectly.

I was hoping that OpenLayers would have fixed this, but this seems to also be a problem.

[mourner]

Done, turned on by default. Pressing enter while focused on a marker fires Leaflet click event (which triggers bound popups etc.). Can be turned off with keyboard: false in options.

[mgifford]

Thanks for doing that just now @mourner

Are there releases in LeafletJS? I was just trying to figure out when that would be part of the default, but looks like it might be now.

I'm wondering if there is an example where I can test this out. I'm assuming that http://leafletjs.com isn't updated based on what's committed to the GitHub repo.

Discoverability is also an issue with these keyboard events. Always tricky knowing how one would know that they needed to press enter on a marker.

[mourner]

Leaflet 0.6 release with this functionality included should be there around tomorrow. Regarding discoverability — enter is the default trigger of clicking on a focused link for people that use keyboard extensively, so it would be very intuitive for focusable markers as well.

[mgifford]

Thanks! Great to hear.