I want to view default button element chrome user agent styles for its hover state, but when I tried to use :hover force state, nothing showed up on styles tab and the button didn't change its appearance. There's nothing for <button> hover state in computed styles either.
There is no hover state provided for a button within the user agent stylesheet. In it's most basic form, a button is a rectangle with a border, which you could see when you force the :focus-visible state. The appearance of a button is controlled based on the operating system theme.
You can read about it and see the difference here.
I want to create a popup next to some data that contains a few input fields. Let's pretend that the we have the following document structure
<input name="before-the-data" type="text />
<div id="the-data"><!-- presents some data --></div>
<input name="after-the-data" type="text />
When you tab forward from before-the-data the popover should open and focus should go to the first input in this popover. This popover is appended to the body kinda of like Modal from material-ui so that it lies above the rest of the content. Similarly the popover should open when you tab backwards from after-the-data.
The popover should behave as if it were inside #the-data for navigation purposes but the actual position would be at the end of <body> for presentation purposes.
To achieve this effect, I set tabindex="0" on #the-data and trigger opening the modal and shift focus into it. This works fine so far.
Now for the question: How do I best create the following effect?
You should be able to navigate back out of the modal. My idea was this: When focus shifts from it or the user clicks outside the modal, we close it and restore focus to the element that had focus before it opened up. This can be done with a simple onblur handler and a onclick on a backplane. To support tabbing, the resulting modal looks like this:
<div id="backplane" onclick="closeAndRestoreFocus()"
onfocusout="checkCloseAndRestoreFocus()">
<div id="beforecanary" onfocus="shiftFocusBefore()" tabindex="0"/>
<!-- popover content -->
<div id="aftercanary" onfocus="shiftFocusAfter()" tabindex="0"/>
</div>
You can see that I added two divs that you can tab to beforecanary and aftercanary. When they get focused they shift focus to before-the-data and after-the-data respectively, to simulate as if the popover was actually inside #the-data.
At this point, you hopefully have understood what I am trying to create. Thus, the question: How good is this approach in general with respect to accessibility and how can I make sure I follow best practices of WAI-ARIA?
we close it and restore focus to the element that had focus before it opened up
That might be considered a tab trap, 2.1.2 No Keyboard Trap. Isn't the element that had focus before the popup the #the-data? So if I tab from before-the-data to #the-data, the popup will open. If I press esc to close the popup (you didn't mention that esc would close the popup but it should), the focus goes back to #the-data, which will automatically open the popup again, won't it? (Because onfocus() ran again.)
If I just tab through the entire process, I think it would work. It's just the dismissing of the popup that causes the problem. Tabbing straight through everything would move focus from before-the-data to #the-data to the elements in the popup to after-the-data then to the rest of the page, right?
When tabbing backwards, from after-the-data to #the-data, is the focus moved into the last element in the popup? Since I'm tabbing backwards, it needs to be on the last item so that I can continue tabbing backwards through the popup and then to before-the-data.
The popover should behave as if it were inside #the-data for navigation purposes but the actual position would be at the end of <body> for presentation purposes.
If the popup is in the DOM at the end, that would not allow a natural tab order. You can certainly put it there but then you have to manage the tab order. It would be much simpler if the popup was truly part of #the-data. Then the browser handles the tab order naturally.
You also have to be careful with automatically opening a popup but it might be a violation of 3.2.1 On Focus. See "Example of a Failure: A help dialog". It sort of describes what you are doing but is a little different. In the failure example, focus is moving to an input field, and the popup opens automatically and the focus moves from the input to the popup. Your case is a little different because you move the focus off the input first (or before-the-data) and then the popup displays, which would not violate 3.2.1. I just wanted to point this out in case you change your interaction model.
So in summary, your current behavior is kind of like a skip link. Skip links are often implemented as "hidden" links that only become visible when you tab to them and allow you to jump to a location on the page. The fact that they become visible upon focus is how your popup works (since it too becomes visible when it receives focus). The difference is that skip links do not dismiss if you press esc. They do dismiss if you click outside of them. I think that's the behavior you're trying to mimic. If you ignore my comment earlier that esc should dismiss your popup, then you'll be ok. I only had that comment because it sounded like your popup was like a modal dialog.
I have popup window, appearing on my site when mouse is hover on some object. Once this happens I can press (in Chrome) Ctrl-Shift-C and activate element selection mode and select any element inside popup window. But once I made selection, web page goes to normal flow and popup window immediately disappears since mouse is not in correct position anymore.
Is it possible to overcome this situation somehow? For example, select element, but not terminate selection mode?
Both Chrome and Firefox have the ability, in their respective DevTools, to set, and keep set, pseudo-classes like hover, active and focus. This allows you to work with the page as if the mouse was interacting with the element(s) for which you change a pseudo-class.
The following show toggling the hover pseudo-class on the Documentation link in the SO top-nav bar.
Here is what it looks like in Chrome:
Here is what it looks like in Firefox:
Note: I've read similar threads, but none quite my issue - I can right click on it fine, it just then disappears.
I find 'Inspect Element' an invaluable tool in Chrome, however I'm having trouble using it for sub-menu for an element on my nav bar, which pops up below on hover of its parent item.
The popup (or down) isn't quite styled how I'd like, so I right-click > inspect element to see what's coming from where exactly, and get a better idea of how to achieve my desired effect.
However, as soon as I move my mouse away from the menu, it's gone; thus I can't select different elements in the inspection pane, and see which area is highlighted at the same time.
Is there a way around this, without changing the menu, so that it stays 'popped up' once activated?
If the hover element is triggered by JS (if triggered by CSS :hover, see gmo's answer), you can inspect it if you pause script execution. This is a much simpler way of freezing the DOM than the other answers suggest. You can pause script execution without losing the hover element as follows:
1. Via a keyboard shortcut
Here's how you do it in Chrome. I'm sure Firefox has an equivalent procedure:
Open up Developer Tools and go to Sources.
Note the shortcut to pause script execution—F8 (there may also be another depending on your OS).
Interact with the UI to get the element to appear.
Hit F8.
Now you can move your mouse around, inspect the DOM, whatever. The element will stay there.
2. Via a delayed debugger statement
Some web pages attach keydown / keypress / keyup event listeners which interfere with the shortcut above. In those cases, you can pause script execution by triggering a debugger statement while the hover is open:
Open the JS console, and enter:
// Pause script execution in 5 seconds
setTimeout(() => { debugger; }, 5000)
Trigger the hover and wait for the debugger statement to execute.
If the hover effect is given with CSS then yes, I normally use two options to get this:
One, to see the hover effect when the mouse leave the hover area:
Open the inspector in docked window and increase the width until reach your HTML element, then right click and the popup menu must be over the inspector zone... then when you move the mouse over the inspector view, the hover effect keep activated in the document.
Two, to keep the hover effect even if the mouse is not over the HTML element, open the inspector, go to Styles TAB and click in the upper right icon that says Toggle Element State...(dotted rectangle with an arrow) There you can manually activate the Hover Event (among others) with the checkbox provided.
If it's not clear at all, let me know and I can add a few screenshots.
Edited: screenshot added.
And finally and as I say at the begining, I only be able to do this if the hover is set with CSS:HOVER... when you control the hover state with jQuery.onMouseOver for example, only works (sometimes), the method One.
Hope it helps.
What worked for me is selecting the specific a tag I wanted to inspect and configure it to break on attribute modification:
After doing the above, I would again normally select that a tag then the dropdown will automatically stay as-is even when I mouseover to other places like Inspect Element, etc.
You can just refresh the browser when doing inspecting the menu dropdown elements to go back to normal state.
Hope this helps. :)
You can also do this in the javascript console:
$('#foo').trigger('mouseover');
An that will "freeze" the element in the "hover" state.
Here's how I do it with no CSS changes or JS pausing in Chrome (I am on a Mac and do not have a PC in front of me if you are running on Win):
have your developer console open.
do not enable the hover inspection tool yet, but instead open up your desired sub menu by moving your mouse over it.
hit Command+Shift+C (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+C (Win/Linux)
now the hover inspection tool will apply to the elements you have opened in your sub-nav.
Open Inspect element
Now go to elements now on right side and select hover
It will show all hover effects
Not sure if it was present in previous browser revisions, but I just found out this extremely simple method.
Open the inspector in chrome or Firefox, right click on the element you are interested in, and select the appropriate option (in this case: hover).
This will trigger the associated CSS.
Screenshots from Firefox 55 and chromium 61.
I needed to do this, but the element I was trying to inspect was added and removed dynamically based on hover state of another element. My solution is similar to this one, but that didn't quite work for me.
So here's what I did:
Add simple script to enter debugger mode upon mouseover of the element that triggers the hover event you're concerned about.
$(document).on('mouseover', '[your-hover-element-selector]', function(e) {
debugger;
});
Then, with the dev console open in Chrome, hover over your element, and you will enter debugger mode. Navigate over to the sources section of the dev tools, and click the "Resume script execution" button (the blue play-like button below).
Once you do that, your DOM will be paused in the hover state, and you can use the element inspector to inspect all the elements as they exist in that state.
I found a very simple way to do this if for some reason you have problems with script pausing:
Open Dev Tools on "inspect"-tab.Hover to make the pop-up appear.Right-click on the desired element in your pop-up and press 'Q' (in Firefox) to inspect that element.Use keyboard to navigate: Arrow Up/Down: Move between elementsArrow Left/Right: Collapse/ExpandTab/Shift+Tab: Move between inspector and CSS rules and inside CSS RulesEnter: Edit CSS Rule
Excellent stuff!
Thank you to gmo for that advice. I did not know about those attribute settings massively helpful.
As a small revision to the wording I would explain that process as follows:
Right Click on the element you would like to style
Open 'Inspect' tool
On right hand side, navigate to the small Styles tab
Found above CSS stylesheet contents
Select the .hov option - This will give you all the settings
available for the selected HTML element
Click and Change all options to be inactive
Now Select the state that you would like to tweak - On activation of any of these, your Stylesheet will jump you directly to those settings:
Styles - Tweaking Filters - Interactive elements
This information was a lifesaver for me, cannot believe I have just heard about it!
Change the CSS so that the property which hides the menu isn't applied while you work on it is what I do.
I'm working with ICEFaces components and I have the need of setting a tooltip on an ice:commandButton.
The button can be enabled or not according to particular conditions, but my problems is that when the button is disabled the tooltip is not displayed.
I display the tooltip by calling a Javascript method in the onmouseover attribute and close it via onmouseout.
Checking with IE dev tools, the two attributes don't get rendered when the button is disabled.
How could I modify this behaviour?
Disabled components neither get focus nor react on any events.
HTML Reference:
When an element is disabled, it
appears dimmed and does not respond to
user input. Disabled elements do not
respond to mouse events, nor will they
respond to the contentEditable
property.
As a workaround you can assign the tooltip to a <div/> around the commandButton.