react / react/react-native

Specify keyboard focus separately from Screen Reader focus

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API: Keyboard Needs: Triage :mag: Never gets stale
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Description

Description

On Android keyboard focus and accessibility focus are handled separately at the system level. Often these match, as many accessibility services use the “focusable” property (which informs keyboard focus), to also inform them where to focus. In API 28 however, Android added the setScreenReaderFocusable property to View (https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/View#setScreenReaderFocusable(boolean)) which allows you to flag a view as being focusable only for screen readers, without making that same view focusable by keyboards.

This is useful since screen readers often want to focus on views that are content only, but not actionable (so their users can hear the content), but focusing on these content elements is not useful for keyboard navigation users, who only need to be able to move between interactive elements.

Right now in React Native, the accessible prop maps to focusable on Android, making the element focusable by both screen readers and keyboard users.

There are a few different approaches we could take here. We could surface a new prop called screenReaderFocusable, that sets focusable to false but screenReaderFocusable to true, we could adjust the accessible prop to only set screenReaderFocusable to true, and add a new prop for keyboardFocusable which sets focusable to true, or we could have the accessible prop contextually set either focusable (if the element is interactive by having a click handler) or screenreaderFocusable (if it’s content only).

Version

0.66

Output of npx react-native info

see description

Steps to reproduce

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Snack, code example, screenshot, or link to a repository

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Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing how React Native's Android accessible prop currently maps to focusable, then read the linked Android View setScreenReaderFocusable API. Compare the proposed prop designs and establish which behavior should apply to interactive versus content-only views. Done means a decided API and separate keyboard and screen-reader focus behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
android, react-native
Domain
accessibility, mobile
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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