How-to: Proper tabindex for Firefox 2.0
This post was published 3 years 4 months 18 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.OS X users may be scratching their heads wondering why tabbing through form elements to the submit or search button on some sites does not work. In previous Firefox releases, a small tweak via the browsers about:config settings would usually do the trick. Unfortunately, the latest Firefox 2 release does not seem to have the necessary accessibility.tabfocus preference is no where to be found.
The fix for proper tabindex in Firefox on the OS X side is to load a browser extension by the name of Configuration Mania. Once installed, restart the browser and open the extension preferences. Within Configuration Mania’s preferences, navigate to UI > Keyboard Navigation and look for “When tab or shift + tab is pressed, move between:” and select ‘Buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, and lists’. Open your usual favorites and test your now functional tabindex.
What i do really hate of Mac Firefox is the “Command + Left arrow”… i do that to select the last line i wrote, but the browser thinks i want to go “Back”…
That’s lovely, but since firefox isn’t to friendly to vision impaired people anyway, and Macs don’t have too many accessibility programs, other than the built in ones, this is interesting. Not to mention it shows how lazy web designers have gotten by rarely using the tabindex attribute…
Ryan, the problem is that firefox refuses to tab to submits, radio, or checkboxes no matter what you put in tabindex.