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.

I am the author.

> 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.

We have. The behaviour is mostly the same whether you're using the keyboard or a pointer (mouse/touch/pen). The only difference is that, for keyboard users, we want to turn off the animation and move the focus to the first link in the menu instead of focussing on the menu's parent <ul>.

The problem was that, as various devs have iterated on the menu over the years, it's broken the fallback behaviour. For my colleague on the funny multi-monitor set up, it should have fallen back to the keyboard no-animation behaviour with no real major difference to the UX, but instead it fell back to the no-JS experience.

So yes, generally don't try to be smart with accessibility, avoid ARIA attributes except where necessary, etc, but click events are the universal input event and work on any kind of input device and have perfect browser support. It's far better for accessibility using them instead of a mix of keydown and mousedown or pointerdown, and potentially missing other kinds of input events.

As I stated in another comment, if it was a scenario where there needs to be a major difference in behaviour between keyboard and pointers, then I would rather use separate keydown and pointerdown events.

> we want to turn off the animation and move the focus to the first link in the menu instead of focussing on the menu's parent

Why not just always turn off the animations? Why not just always move the focus to the link?

What is the benefit of the animation to the user? What is the benefit of focusing on the menu’s parent to the user?

One rule of thumb with accessibility is that accessible products are usually better for everyone.

> What is the benefit of the animation to the user?

Animations enhance experience by drawing attention to state changes and providing intuitive feedback to user actions.

If you don't find them engaging or useful, that's fine - and you can set prefers-reduced-motion to true on your client - , but many people do.

> What is the benefit of focusing on the menu’s parent to the user?

The first item was not interacted with nor navigated to, therefore it shouldn't be focused under normal circumstances. It would be unexpected behavior.

Focusing the first item in keyboard interactions is an accessibility hack recommended by W3C:

https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/menubar/

> Animations enhance experience by drawing attention to state changes and providing intuitive feedback to user actions.

> If you don't find them engaging or useful, that's fine - and you can set prefers-reduced-motion to true on your client - , but many people do.

The question here is not "does an animation have worth", but how is that worth tied to whether an onclick event originated from the mouse or the keyboard? Your reasoning applies equally to both, and thus leaves us still confused: why are we varying the animation by input device?