Keyboard Access and Internet Explorer
Friday, February 25th, 2005 at 1:07 pmInternet Explorer once again manages to amaze me. Sadly enough not in a positive way.
I am working on a dynamic A to Z listing for a local council page (they are a legal requirement), and thought marking them up as a list of links pointing to named anchors is enough.
It is for Firefox, and old browsers, but Internet Explorer has one big bug. Try to tab through the A to Z navigation via keyboard and press enter. MSIE takes you to the section you have chosen, and the logical next move is to hit tab again to reach the first link in that section – in this case, the link back to the navigation. If you do it though, you’ll find that MSIE takes you back to the navigation!
A workaround is giving the named anchor an href, or, and now comes the really odd bit, nest the link inside an element and give it a width in the CSS.
More information about the bug on Jim Thatcher’s site.