patternfly / patternfly/patternfly-react
Menu: MenuFooter children excluded from arrow-key navigation
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- Dominant language
- TypeScript
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Description
Description
Children placed inside MenuFooter (e.g., a "Browse" button) are excluded from the Menu component's roving tabindex arrow-key navigation. Users can Tab to reach MenuFooter items, but arrow keys skip over them entirely.
This breaks the expected keyboard pattern where all interactive items within a menu are reachable via arrow keys.
WCAG Impact
- 2.1.1 Keyboard — All interactive elements within the menu should be reachable via the menu's keyboard navigation pattern (arrow keys)
Steps to Reproduce
- Create a
Menuwith severalMenuItementries and aMenuFootercontaining aButton - Open the menu and use arrow keys to navigate
- Observe that arrow keys cycle through
MenuItementries but never reach theMenuFooterbutton - The
MenuFooterbutton is only reachable viaTab, which exits the menu's roving tabindex pattern
Expected Behavior
Arrow-key navigation should include MenuFooter children as the last item(s) in the navigation sequence, or there should be an opt-in mechanism to include footer actions in the roving tabindex.
Context
We use MenuFooter to place a "Browse" action inside select dropdowns (e.g., PageFormAsyncSingleSelect in ansible/ansible-ui). Keyboard users cannot reach the Browse button via arrow keys, only via Tab — which is inconsistent with the rest of the menu's keyboard model.
Jira Issue: PF-4544
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by locating the Menu and MenuFooter component implementations and their keyboard-navigation tests, then reproduce the reported behavior with MenuItem entries and a footer Button. Trace how roving tabindex items are collected. Done means footer children participate in arrow-key navigation, with tests covering the expected sequence.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- react, typescript
- Domain
- accessibility, frontend
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 64/100