Tag Archives: input type=file

Firefox 1.5 ignores changing tabIndex of input type=file

One can change the tabIndex of a file input in FF1.5 and verify the value has changed, but the browser will ignore the change and use whatever value was staticly defined at page load.

As a workaround, see if you can define ‘tabindex’ for all items in the markup. If you’ll be dynamicly adding non-file inputs, set their tabIndex to be the same as whatever they should come after in tab order — browsers use doc order to break ties in tabIndex values. To dynamicly add file inputs, put something like this in the markup:

  <input type=file id=file0 tabindex=N onchange… /><span id=file1container></span>

Then, when you add a new file input, assign to the innerHTML property of the span rather than using createElement. (You probably also want to style the old input as display:none, depending on what you’re trying to do.)  The tabindex of the new input can be N also.

UPDATE: Once the file input is filled, one might want to take it out of the tab order. Setting tabIndex = -1 has no effect in FF1.5, and setting the style to display:none (or visibility:hidden) will cause Safari 2.0.3 to ignore it when sending the request. I haven’t found a solution that works for all browsers.

Nonvisible file inputs are not “Accessible”

File inputs are pretty ugly, and can be confusing to naive users (e.g., “Should I type what I want in that box?”).  Quirksmode describes a nicer solution that mail.aol.com (Compose) happens to use:
http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/inputfile.html

But if one cares about Big-A accessibility, such a solution won’t work for users with normal vision who are limited to the keyboard (no mice), such as those with carpal tunnel syndrome.  The reason it won’t work is that such users rely on tab order, and tabbing into an invisible file input consumes 2 tabs before one sees any visible result — the user won’t know they are on top of the Browse button.

One might suggest putting the nonfunctional button in the tab order, and when it receives focus, call click() on the nonvisible file input. But in my experiments, click() did not trigger a FileOpen dialog.

One might also suggest faking focus on the nonfunctional button by drawing a rectangle around it when the nonvisible file input receives focus.  But remember that file inputs consume 2 tabs — it might make sense to draw the rectangle on the second tab, when focus is on the Browse button, but what about the first tab?  Even if there are separate events from the file input from the tabs, which seems doubtful, what would one display for the first tab?

A decent compromise is to get rid of the nonfunctional button and make the file input visible.  But like the mail.aol.com use, hide the inputs once they are used and show a checkbox with the filename instead, with focus moved to this checkbox (so blind users will be aware of the result of their file selection).