How to ignore HTML element from tabindex?

Question

Is there any way in HTML to tell the browser not to allow tab indexing on particular elements?

On my page though there is a sideshow which is rendered with jQuery, when you tab through that, you get a lot of tab presses before the tab control moves to the next visible link on the page as all the things being tabbed through are hidden to the user visually.

Answer 1

You can use tabindex="-1".

The W3C HTML5 specification supports negative tabindex values:

If the value is a negative integer
The user agent must set the element's tabindex focus flag, but should not allow the element to be reached using sequential focus navigation.

---

Watch out though that this is a HTML5 feature and might not work with old browsers.
To be W3C HTML 4.01 standard (from 1999) compliant, tabindex would need to be positive.

Answer 2

Just add the attribute disabled to the element (or use jQuery to do it for you). Disabled prevents the input from being focused or selected at all.

Answer 3

The way to do this is by adding tabindex="-1". By adding this to a specific element, it becomes unreachable by the keyboard navigation. There is a great article here that will help you further understand tabindex.

Answer 4

If these are elements naturally in the tab order like buttons and anchors, removing them from the tab order with tabindex=-1 is kind of an accessibility smell. If they're providing duplicate functionality removing them from the tab order is ok, and consider adding aria-hidden=true to these elements so assistive technologies will ignore them.

Answer 5

If you are working in a browser that doesn't support tabindex="-1", you may be able to get away with just giving the things that need to be skipped a really high tab index. For example tabindex="500" basically moves the object's tab order to the end of the page.

I did this for a long data entry form with a button thrown in the middle of it. It's not a button people click very often so I didn't want them to accidentally tab to it and press enter. disabled wouldn't work because it's a button.

Answer 6

Don't forget that, even though tabindex is all lowercase in the specs and in the HTML, in Javascript/the DOM that property is called tabIndex.

Don't lose your mind trying to figure out why your programmatically altered tab indices calling element.tabindex = -1 isn't working. Use element.tabIndex = -1.