Regarding focus, you ask if the focus can be kept on the buttons without using focus(). Absolutely. In fact, when you click on a button, the focus will not move unless you specifically move it or if the element you clicked on gets hidden. So if your desire is to leave the focus on the button, then you don't have to do anything.

That's the preferred behavior - leave the focus on the button. If I'm exploring the carousel slides and I'm a keyboard user, I will navigate/tab to the "next" button and press enter. I'll review the slide and if it's not what I want, I'll press enter again (assuming my focus remained on the "next" button) to see the next slide. If you force the focus to move away from the button and to the carousel content, then I have to navigate back to the "next" button before I can view the next slide. It can be annoying to have to keep navigating back to the element I just selected.

I don't understand your third or fourth questions.

Have you looked at the two W3.org references regarding carousels?

• https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#carousel
• https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/carousels/