data viewer should gain keyboard focus when activated

[kevinushey]

System details

RStudio Edition : Desktop
RStudio Version : v1.2.440
OS Version      : macOS 10.13.3
R Version       : 3.4.4

Steps to reproduce the problem

Open the data viewer with e.g. View(mtcars). Then attempt to scroll using the arrow keys.

Describe the problem in detail

The viewer is not scrolled.

Describe the behavior you expected

The data viewer should gain keyboard focus after activation, so that one can easily scroll with the keyboard. In the same vein, Ctrl + 1 should transfer focus to an open data viewer when possible as well.

[adamconroy]

@gtritchie what is your opinion on this for accessibility? I'm not sure if focus stealing would be good or bad in this case. I can see an argument wanting to keep the focus in the terminal as well.

[gtritchie]

Agree with Kevin, data viewer should get keyboard focus when opened with View and when opened with Ctrl+1. It's fine for a different part of the UI to get focus as result of a user action.

Several similar interwoven issues that I'll be working on in 1.4, so feel free to assign to me. For example, see #5652.

[gtritchie]

The major case where a pane shouldn't grab focus as a result of user action is when navigating between tabs with keyboard (e.g. as you captured in #5515.

[adamconroy]

👍

[gtritchie]

This is closer to working; the source columns F6 pane-switching work done by @melissa-barca now results in the data viewer's toolbar getting keyboard focus. However you still cannot tab into the actual grid and use the arrows to scroll.

I did try giving the dataTables_scrollBody element tabindex=0 which DOES enable the ability to put focus on it and scroll with arrows, but several issues would still need to be resolved.

• the column headings (for sorting, filtering, etc) also accept keyboard focus, but have no visible focus indicators so it seems like nothing is happening when you start tabbing around (can be fixed with some styling)
• when the scrollBody has tabindex=0, even clicking on with the mouse causes focus rectangle to show, thus likely need to hook up focus-visible polyfill inside this iframe
• when the scrollBody has focus, the focus rectangle is ugly, and some parts are not visible; so more styling work needed

So, all told, too much to mess with for 1.4; moving to 1.5.