Better align custom tab logic with tab component

[NickColley]

The Tabs component in the Design System has features such as:

• better keyboard access

We should investigate getting the custom design system tabs to behave closer to the Tab component.

[hannalaakso]

https://trello.com/c/wF6tmFc1 will address better keyboard access but we're not doing the URL setting feature for now.

[dashouse]

Let's look at this as part of #677

[NickColley]

I've investigated this by forking the tabs component and trying to get it to behave similar to the current application tabs component, my notes:

• need to remove the 'contents' heading for mobile
• need to remove 'unenhanced' mobile view, since it'd be too much content to show everything expanded
• remove hash url stuff since it doesnt work that well with multiple tabs on one page.

It would be possible to add features and such to the tabs component to make it work nicely but I'm wondering if we should close this as I'm not aware of any barriers for users and the effort to get them aligned is quite a lot?

We could open specific actionable issues for this in the future if we find barriers for users.

[kellylee-gds]

We think this is an inconsistency but not an accessibility issue in itself, therefore we are not going to prioritise this work at this time.

[matthewford]

Not sure if this issue covers this - but you cannot press the tab key, to get to other 'tabs' in the tab component.

[hannalaakso]

@matthewford The tabs component is navigated by pressing the arrow keys on the keyboard. Pressing the tab key shouldn't operate the tabs component but move the focus to the next element in the tab order.
I hope this helps but let us know if I've misunderstood your issue.

[matthewford]

@hannalaakso Thanks, that works.

[lfdebrux]

This looks like tech debt to me; we should be using the tabs component from the Design System simply to reduce the maintenance burden of this repo. I've added the tech debt label.

Edited to add: However, given that the impact of the debt is low and the effort to pay down is high, this is probably a low priority.