So I was working on the issue in the previous entry, and found something weird when it comes to macs: IE and FF respond the way you'd expect when tabbing through a web page on the PC, but things are Different(tm) on a mac.

Turns out that Safari, when OSX is in the default configuration, ignores tabindex completely. Same thing with Firefox. The solution is to go to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts and check "Turn on full keyboard access", which is unchecked by default.

This allows Safari to follow tabindex (and presumably accesskey) properties. But Firefox is even worse--you have to do the about:config thing and set the accessibility.tabfocus property from 1 to 7. The possible values for accessibility.tabfocus are:

1: Text field form controls only
2: All form controls except text fields
3: All form controls
4: Hyperlinks and hyperlinked images
7: All form controls and hyperlinks

This is apparently a long-standing Mozilla bug (239175) and it sounds like the mozilla guys have been trying to figure out how to get Moz to respond to that checkbox but aren't having much luck. So there's some argument about what to set it to in the default configuration. Not much progress there, apparently.

Anyway, it was a trivial change for us to add the tabindex in a sensible order on the login page, but it sucks that most mac users won't ever see the benefits (unless they read this post).