Proposal: prevent interacting with highlighted content during the TOUR

Development
1

Hello!
When using a TOUR, keyboard users cannot interact with the highlighted elements, while the mouse users can. This inconsistency in features depending on tools used to interact with XWiki is a small accessibility mistake.
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For example, on the first highlight, mouse users can start editing the page while in the tour:

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The technical solution to make it possible for keyboard users to interact only with highlighted elements would be quite complex and computationally costly.
I believe this interaction is not something we intend.
I believe this interaction is on average more harm than help, because it interrupts the tour.
I can think of a couple use cases for this feature, but IMO they are very niche and the improvement on more common use cases balance these:

  1. Newish users use the tour to find back where a feature is and want to use it ASAP. Quite roundabout way to do things. Not sure how many people would actually do this…
  2. Admin devs configured a tour and some scripts that expects the user to interract with the highlighted content. IMO if the admin devs have the knowledge to do this, we can expect them to read release notes or figure out + revert the change by themselves (doable in only a couple lines of CSS).

Therefore I propose to:
Prevent mouse users from interacting with the highlighted content.
This is technically a feature regression.

Do you agree with this proposal?
Is there a common use case where this feature is necessary?

Thank you for your participation in this discussion!
Lucas C.

PS I’ll close this discussion on 2026-01-05T23:00:00Z , any comments and opinions shared after this date are welcome but it will be more difficult to act on them.

2

+1

3

Wouldn’t it be possible to add a setting in the TourCode.TourClass to turn on or off the interaction as a feature that’s turned off by default?

I hadn’t considered guiding thru a workflow as a use case for a tour before, but it does sound interesting! :wink:

…as default setting +1

4

It’s possible, but like for any setting, we need to make sure it’s worth including/keeping it. It would take some time for anyone not participating to this discussion to understand the new setting, no matter how well we describe it. IMO the use cases are so niche that it’s not worth including such a setting in XWiki Standard.

I’d advise you to use the made with intent Target Page tour step property instead of a customization around the interactions :slight_smile:

Thank you for taking the time to help!
Lucas C.

1 Like
5

+1

6

I’m closing the discussion, as planned.
Results:

  • 3* +1
  • 1* +0

The proposal is pretty much accepted. Note that this is not a VOTE so it’s completely okay to come back on this later if needed.

I’ll move forward with XWIKI-23100: When using the TOUR, page elements can be accessed by a mouse but not a keyboard by Sereza7 · Pull Request #4500 · xwiki/xwiki-platform · GitHub :+1: