December 30, 2025
A really common pattern for modal dialogs is that when the dialog is opened, focus is taken to the dialog container.
This is despite the fact that the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative modal dialog tutorial (and pretty much any modal dialog example/tutorial I've ever seen) tells people to take focus to something inside the dialog.
Focusing the dialog container can cause accessibility problems:
in…
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Don't focus the modal dialog container when opening a dialog
November 26, 2025
I found a weird issue during a recent accessibility audit. I was testing a slideshow using the NVDA screen reader and keyboard navigation. The slideshow uses tab controls for the controls to switch the slides (incorrect IMO, but that's a different topic).
The problem was that when my keyboard focus was on the currently selected tab/slideshow control, I couldn't use up and down arrow keys to…
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Buttons with the tab role prevent NVDA keyboard navigation