keyboard problem?

[JV]

I have an ASP.NET web page where IE keyboard navigation does not appear to
work as it should. Normally you can tab through hyperlinks on a web page,
and press <ENTER> to activate the current hyperlink. On my page, you cannot
tab to some of the hyperlinks and pressing <ENTER> does nothing. This is a
critical problem for accessibility.

I am aware of the TABINDEX attribute, but many of my hyperlinks are being
generated from within a datagrid and it is not straightforward to assign
them each a tab stop. But the real question is why doesn't the default
tab/enter functionality work?

 

[JV]

Actually I figured out that the tab problem was caused by not setting the
NavigateUrl (href) attribute -- these controls have javascript attached to
the OnClick event.

What really concerns me is why the ENTER key does not act like a click when
the hyperlink has focus. It appears (so far) that if the "href" property
contains javascript rather than a static URL, then the ENTER key stops
working. I can't think of a reason this would be done intentionally, it's
more likely a bug.

 

[Eliyahu Goldin]

What's the problem in assigning TabIndex? In PreRender event loop through
the datagrid rows and calculate TabIndex based on the loop index. This will
fix the tab problem.

Eliyahu

 

[JV]

For the record, I was right and I was wrong. It was a bug, but it wasn't an
IE bug. It turns out that the guys who originally wrote this code had some
javascript code that disabled the ENTER key (what a brilliant idea). I just
found it and got rid of it.