Don't automatically tab between fields

alphagov / government-service-design-manual

Government Service Design Manual

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual

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Don't automatically tab between fields #574

Closed joelanman closed 9 years ago

joelanman commented 9 years ago

this is general advice, but occurs most often in this pattern

Demotive commented 9 years ago

+1 - totally agree

jabley commented 9 years ago

I agree with this personally. Do we have evidence which we could link to?

Demotive commented 9 years ago

Hmm good point. Mine's a personal agreement too. However the fact that something like automatic tabbing actively interferes with default controls (ever tried to shift-tab back through something like this?) means perhaps one shouldn't have to "prove" this? [@jabley - I might be misinterpreting your comment, let me know. If I am, then I'll drop this comment]

timpaul commented 9 years ago

I've seen people stumble in user research enough times to be convinced it's sound advice. A few other arguments against:

It's even harder for screen reader users to spot that they've been tabbed
If you allow for multiple formats within a field (eg. '1', '01' or 'Jan'), how do you know when to tab?

cjforms commented 9 years ago

+1 to agree with it, and support Tim's evidence.

(At some point, let's do a line-by-line assessment of where we want to document what we've seen in user research as blog posts / other publications to refer to. But let's not postpone publishing good practice just because we haven't got time to write up a formal evidence thing yet).