Post editing area: keyboard accessibility, tab order and focus

[afercia]

This ticket aims to focus on a specific area of the UI, let's call it "Post editing area", the one that starts with the "Title" field and ends with the editor area, both in "Visual" and "Text" mode.

Related: #27553 while researching we noticed:

joedolson: outstanding issues surrounding tab order, but this are long-standing and not relevant to this specific patch and issue; that needs to be raised separately.

There's room for accessibility improvements here, especially when it comes to tab order and focus management. To fully understand what's going on you should stop for a while being a "nervous clicker" :) and:

• apply the patch from #27553
• unplug your mouse and disable your trackpad :)
• use just your keyboard
• tab around, both forwards and backwards

It would be great to test also switching off your display and using a screen reader, I would recommend Firefox and NVDA.

Two main issues:

Focus.
When you're in the "Title" field and then you tab forwards, focus is moved directly inside the editor area skipping all what's in between.
While this *may* be useful for sighted keyboard users (they save a few key presses, say 1 second?), it's a very critical experience for screen reader users: when they tab forwards, they get that right after the title there's the editor. But when they tab backwards, they get many more elements that "weren't there before". more details on 27553 comments.

Tab order.
The "tabbing experience" in Visual and Text mode should match as much as possible. Ideally, there should be a better ​logical sequence in the markup. When editing the title, the next logical step is editing the content, all the other controls (Add Media button, additional buttons provided by plugins and themes, etc.) should not be placed between the Title and the editor. The CEUX project proposed something similar at some point.

There is ongoing research and development on the editing experience, see for example Editor Focus/DFW in #29806 and the idea to review relevant parts of the UI, see ​explore moving the Publish | Save | Preview buttons out of the metabox, etc. so it would be a great opportunity to explore this ticket too.

[joedolson]

This is definitely an important issue; regardless of any screen reader questions, the experience for a keyboard-dependent user in the editor is simply confusing; it's extremely hard to predict where you're going to go next or figure out how to get to certain controls via the keyboard.

[trishasalas]

This ticket is a lot to absorb! I'm going to read through all of the associated tickets and test this myself so that I have a better understanding of the behavior the ticket is describing. I'll reply back here afterwards. I'd love to help work some of these issues out :)

[afercia]

Just to keep track of the changes related to the tab order in this area, now the WP editor "toggle tabs" are focusable, see changeset 30002

[afercia]

Interesting also for the user experience on desktop, see the video posted by Mark Jaquith. I couldn't agree more, especially about his comment on the section on the top, in the last 30 seconds.
Post editing experience on iPhone 6
​https://make.wordpress.org/flow/2014/11/11/post-editing-experience-on-iphone-6/

[afercia]

Related: #29989
See also Ryan Boren's post:
​https://make.wordpress.org/flow/2014/10/16/a-survey-of-media_buttons-macnchrome-iphone-5-4-1-alpha-20141015/

[afercia]

New related post by Ryan Boren:
​The location of Add Media on phones

[afercia]

Related: #18306 see hiding the sample permalink beneath an icon next to the title

[afercia]

Related: #33895

[afercia]

#36659 was marked as a duplicate.

[afercia]

Discussed this during today's accessibility bug scrub and it is definitely something we'd like to discuss at WCEU, maybe also a good candidate for a feature project.

[afercia]

Related: #29923

[afercia]

For similar issues related to the new Editor project (Gutenberg), see ​https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/467

[afercia]

#40691 was marked as a duplicate.

[joedolson]

Per conversation with @alexstine in an accessibility bug scrub, he'd like to see this happen. He comments (with reference to the classic editor):"I think we should push for the improvement. To date, it's how blind people still use self-hosted WordPress."

Practically, if this is the primary tool for a group of people, we should still explore beneficial changes.

[afercia]

Now that this is milestoned for 6.5, I'd like to give it a try.