Keyboard navigation unexpectedly throws user to the other column in stacked column chart when setting some value to null

[maksim-pushkin-team-wrike]

Expected behaviour

When I have one of the values for chart set to null, I expect keyboard navigation to work in an expected way:
when press left/right arrow button it should lead focus to the other columns if there are such.
And when I press up/down arrow button it should lead focus to the other bars inside the same column if there are such

Actual behaviour

When I have a value in some column set to null, let's say, between the other not-null values and mean to navigate the column containing the null value by pressing up/down arrows, the focus gets thrown to the other columns, which is unexpected and also makes navigation a bit complicated.

Live demo with steps to reproduce

In this fiddle the first column (Arsenal) has null value.
https://jsfiddle.net/me9xab5r/4/

Product version

10.2.1

Affected browser(s)

probably, all

[maksim-pushkin-team-wrike]

This bug is also actual for the more natural case like in this demo: https://www.highcharts.com/demo/bar-stacked,the focus can be thrown unexpectedly to the neighbour column while navigating through the middle column by left/right arrow keys

[oysteinmoseng]

Thanks for reporting. This is a fairly general issue that applies to many chart types with the current keyboard navigation model. The logic should be rewritten to better handle cases like this.

A suboptimal workaround is to set seriesNavigation.mode to serialize, which will make it behave consistently, but only allow one dimensional navigation through each series: https://jsfiddle.net/dhp0nfj4/

[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions!

[kamil-musialowski]

unstale, issue still present

[oysteinmoseng]

We will investigate if we can provide a quick fix for this, or a workaround. The longer term (2024, early 2025) plan involves a rewrite of how Highcharts handles keyboard navigation in general.

[marvin19]

Workaround: https://jsfiddle.net/maritavindedal/nhbfqe9o/
Created custom accessibility component to tweak keyboard navigation logic for stacked column chart. Included more null points than the original demo to make sure solution is flexible.