Strange Behaviour in Opera 9
A couple of days ago, I was just putting the finishing touches to a proposed design for a new client when I ran a final keyboard navigation check on it in my copy of Opera 9. To my complete suprise (and horror), the A and Q keys that are normally used to cycle forward and back through links behaved bizzarely. Even worse, I was completely unable to access some links on the page and the site navigation menu using these standard Opera navigation keys. Something was seriously wrong!
Two days of on-and-off research and testing later and I think I might have stumbled across a keyboard focus bug in Opera 9. If it is, indeed, a bug, then it’s only triggered in particular circumstances (isn’t that the case with most bugs?) and seems to involve a combination of styled enclosings divs, off screen positioned links and pages with links below the “fold line”. I tried about three different methods of positioning the skip link off screen but, in every case, the “bug” was triggered. So it doesn’t appear be a problem relating to a specific approach so much as actually moving links off screen in certain situations.
Since it’s quite complex to describe, I’ve set up some test pages for people to check this out and confirm whether this is a bug or not.
In the meantime, I’ve been looking at a range of sites using Opera 9 (which isn’t normally my browser of choice) and I haven’t come across similar behaviour anywhere else. Generally Opera seems to behave as I’d expect it to behave everywhere else but on these pages. All the test page have been validated for markup and CSS to rule out anything caused by silly typing errors. So if anyone spots something obvious that I’ve completely missed, please put me out of my misery…