A BBC navigation bar component broke depending on the external monitor

For anyone who didn't click through to the WebKit bug report the author submitted, a WebKit dev asked him to clarify why the BBC finds it beneficial to be able to detect that the event was sent from a keyboard. This is the author's response:

> Ironically, I want interoperability on this to help with use cases relating to accessibility.

> I work at the BBC and, on our UK website, our navigation bar menu button behaves slightly differently depending on if it is opened with a pointer or keyboard. The click event will always open the menu, but:

> - when opening with a pointer, the focus moves to the menu container.

> - when opening with a keyboard, there is no animation to open the menu and the focus moves to the first link in the menu.

> Often when opening a menu, we don't want a slightly different behaviour around focus and animations depending on if the user 'clicks' with a pointer or keyboard.

> The 'click' event is great when creating user experiences for keyboard users because it is device independent. On keyboards, it is only invoked by Space or Enter key presses. If we were to use the keydown event, we would have to check whether only the the Space or Enter keys were pressed.

Source: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=281430

Seems like a non bug to me.

The first mistake the developer made, was that he wanted to create a different user experience between keyboard and mouse. Stick to what you get by default and design your components so they work for both usecases. Don't try to be smart when it comes to accessibility.

What he ended up doing is what I would have considered a hack. A solution that inevitably breaks or has side effects.

The reason there rarely are good handles to do things differently in accessibility context, is because it's not something that's meant to be handled differently.

See I work in accessibility. Like I provide and create solutions direct to end users with complex needs. Not regular web accessibility. I get the view of this. It’s the same idea of universal access. But actually I don’t fully agree. Yes. If you can stick to this principle - and do try / but I promise you edge cases - which in itself is what accessibility users are all about - cause headaches. At some level you have to do custom stuff. It’s the best way. Take for example switch users. Yes. If your ui is tab able - great. But what if you need your items scannable in frequency order. Your tab index needs to change to meet the end users needs. Or eye gaze users. The accuracy level changes. Add in cognitive issues. You can’t just make a one size fits all interface. At some stage you need to significantly customize it. You can’t rely on a user just learning a complex system level interaction technique- if they can’t do that you have to customise on an individual level.