Can I ignore some website element when navigating using the tab key?

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+4 Q:

Can I ignore some website element when navigating using the tab key?

As question really. I have an input box on my page that I would like to ignore when navigating using the keyboard tab key.

I'm using this input box as a simple bot honeytrap and positioning it off the page, so at the moment when using the tab key, it looks to the user as though nothing has focus when they tab to this element.

+6 A:

You can use tabindex attribute to define order in which the tab key should cycle through elements. If you set tabindex="-1" the element will be skipped.

More info is available here http://www.webcheatsheet.com/HTML/controll_tab_order.php for example.

UPDATE changed tabindex="0" to "-1" based on comments

michal kralik 2010-05-03 12:35:05

This is only part of the solution, though - the focus will end up at the element at some point, just later.

Pekka 2010-05-03 12:38:15

This is incorrect: http://jsfiddle.net/6QuHc/

Nick Craver 2010-05-03 12:38:21

Tabindex=0 causes the element to be indexed using the normal conventions — http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/editing.html#negative-tabindex — it is used to add elements to the normal sequence that are not normally focusable, not to exclude them.

David Dorward 2010-05-03 12:39:06

+1 `tabindex='-1'` indeed seems to work completely (with the input element coming out of the rotation). Deleting my answer with the JS approach.

Pekka 2010-05-03 13:44:57

Setting tabindex to -1 works great - thanks for all the replies and suggestions.

thor 2010-05-05 10:12:18

+1 A:

display: none it instead.

David Dorward 2010-05-03 12:35:23

True, but more advanced bots might check for that. (as they might for positioning it off the page, but that's real advanced).

Konerak 2010-05-03 12:37:28

That is, hypothetically, possible. OTOH, if you off-screen it then screen readers will present it to real users.

David Dorward 2010-05-03 12:40:48

I did consider setting display to none but I was concerned that bots would find this much easier to check than positioning off-page, as Konerak stated.I'd already tested it with some screen-reading software and noticed it appears as an unlabelled text input box. This is obviously an issue but it's one I think we're going to have to live with for the time being and take another look at it later.

thor 2010-05-05 10:10:33

+2 A:

You can set the tabindex="-1" on this element so it's ignored in the tad order. 0 tells the browser to figure out the tab order on it's own, -1 tells the browser to ignore it.

Nick Craver 2010-05-03 12:35:23

ansaurus

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Can I ignore some website element when navigating using the tab key?

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