Arrant nonsense
keyboard-enabled websites are easy to write, and always have been. If they are bigger, only insignificantly so. Why am I unsurprised that MS are trying to inveigle their way into this non-issue? Embrace, extend, extinguish, no doubt.
Microsoft previews tech to ease creation of keyboard-accessible websites
Microsoft has started a preview of technology that eases the task of developing websites with complex navigation elements that don’t need a pointing device to operate. Patrick Brosset, principal product manager for Microsoft Edge, says the world needs better tools for accessible websites because less than half use tabindex, an …
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Friday 6th March 2026 09:33 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Arrant nonsense
You're saying that like it's a good thing. From the would-be visitor's PoV it's a disaster. It means sites get picky about the browser visitors are using. To take a car analogy it's like building a supermarket what only admits customers to its car park if they're driving a particular make of car.
But that doesn't matter to you, does it? You're not building websites for the potential customers, you're building them for marketing and the coloured pencil department. AKA being too clever by hald and not half clever enough. The Internet Exploder mentality has not gone away.
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Friday 6th March 2026 11:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Arrant nonsense
And there is a cadre of web developers who are only too happy to sell that kind of crap: they are enabling the worst excesses of the web for their own gain.
We get angry at the the companies that own these web sites and keep making them worse. Don't forget that those developers are also companies and equally open to criticism as any polluters.
Yes, individual Register readers work at making this junk and will try to play the "I am only doing my job, making what the client asks for" but don't get sucked in, they chose to go down that route and get their hands dirty.
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Friday 6th March 2026 23:12 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Arrant nonsense
That's the trouble. A site is intended to be used. There's a name for achieving usability - a goal the customer ought to have thought about but didn't, or possibly assumed they didn't need to specify because they expected it to be a given - while meeting the customers other goals. That name is "professionalism".
How many jobs specify "the product must piss off its users"?
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Friday 6th March 2026 08:26 GMT FF22
It's all for AI
No human uses keyboard navigation, save for some impaired individuals (but there's a long-standing and "aria" standard to support them), because it's highly ineffective in many ways compared to using a mouse or touch. Also, you can't even use keyboard navigation on most devices today, because the majority of devices used to browse the web don't even have an actual keyboard (ie. because they're smartphones with touchscreens).
In reality it's about making navigation easier for AI agents, who have a hard time separating and understanding navigation elements.Microsoft wants everyone to make it easier for MS's AI agents to steal and abuse their content and services.
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Friday 6th March 2026 11:06 GMT John Robson
Re: It's all for AI
Keyboard navigation should be rapid and simple.
It does two main things:
- It means you don't need to move your hands from the home row, which is always faster than moving the whole arm to a mouse, trackpad, trackball or other pointing device
- It enables assistive technologies - remember, "the disabled" are the only minority group you can join at any time
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Friday 6th March 2026 11:43 GMT that one in the corner
Re: It's all for AI
> No human uses keyboard navigation
Ye gods and little fishes, it is bad enough to come across someone who clearly just piddles their days away at the computer instead of getting stuck into a task and wishing for every efficiency gain. But to justify themselves by claiming that *nobody* ever works that way...
This is clearly somebody for whom the phrase "hack mode" means nothing. Who has no idea even that ALT-TAB exists. Who never wants to copy that complicated declaration from the online docs into the editor, without breaking stride or losing focus. Who never sees a website with content that has value* and is worth quoting in your own piece, be that the amazing innovation that'll solve The Problem that has plagued Company Ltd for the last two years or just a diatribe on The Register.
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Friday 6th March 2026 15:41 GMT GSS
Re: It's all for AI
I do have to disagree. I often use keyboard navigation as a fully able user when a page is designed well enough for it. That said most pages with large navigation headers and menus are too cumbersome to use with a keyboard. See html cyoa games made using tiddlywiki or sugar cube for good examples of keyboard navigation. They often allow you to press a number on the keyboard to make a choice and reveal the relevant passage / section. Even tab is good enough if the game / page dev hasn't tried to overwrite it. And the menu handling saves or inventory is often after the main navigation choices in the tab index as it should be for such pages.
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Friday 6th March 2026 22:22 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Re: It's all for AI
No human uses keyboard navigation, save for some impaired individuals
Well, I'm either not a human or an impaired individual. At least, when it comes to keyboard operation of editors - for aeons, it was possible to do edit/copy paste in Notepad using just the keyboard - and then Microsoft went and broke it
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Friday 6th March 2026 10:59 GMT Roland6
April 1st already?
"You can find focusgroup here."
The hyperlink is to: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/tabindex
Aside: Suspect actually meant to link to: Focusgroup (Explainer)
Given the power of WAP, with respect to the ease with which a WAP site can be made accessible, especially to voiceweb clients, I would of thought focusgroup is something a decent web editor should be able to do, given its something tools like Word have effectively been doing (for outlining documents) for decades.
