Define accessibility guidelines for retaining focus across page loads when sorting, filtering, or pagination is used
The following note was a part of the conversation surrounding #294433, which was identified in an accessibility audit.
As per our conversation on the Feb 25th UX/FE Foundations call, this issue is pretty broad in scope. The reason that focus is reset when sorting, filtering, or pagination options are selected is that a new page is loaded. This issue applies to every single location in GitLab where a list of items can have sorting, filtering, or pagination applied to it.
To make this more user friendly we need to either refactor these pages into SPAs or create a standardized way to pass some sort of "auto focus" token into the next page load which would place focus back on the element that was used to perform the action.
What is the standard best practice from an accessibility perspective? Should we re-assign this issue as a UX Research initiative?
After we have some guidelines in place for a consistent way to handle this UX pattern across GitLab, then we can create an epic and assign fixes for the individual areas to their respective teams.