Make FF & Safari check boxes and buttons tabbable (tab between)

Question

One thing I do like about IE (maybe the only thing) is how one can tab between input boxes, check boxes and action buttons. I think this makes filling out forms so much quicker and easier.

Safari and FF will tab between text input boxes, but ignore checkboxes and action buttons altogether.

Can I force Firefox and Safari to let my users tab between input boxes, check boxes and action buttons? How would I code that in?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

I had a similar issue with Safari. Apparently Safari skips checkboxes, buttons and anchors in the tab rotation (regardless of the "tabindex" setting) by default.

In order for Safari to correctly focus these input elements you need to enable an "Accessibility" setting located in the advanced tab of Safari preferences. "Press TAB to highlight each item on a web page." Once this setting is checked the tabbing order works as expected (like chrome) and items can be removed from the tab rotation by setting tabindex property to -1.

Manually forcing the focus to these elements does work without this setting enabled but requires extra code attached to the bracketing elements to capture tab and/or shift-tab to manually focus.

Spent way too much time trying to code around this Safari feature!