The W3C HTML specification has the following warning and user agent requirement:

Use of the autofocus attribute can reduce usability and accessibility for users. Users of assistive technology can be adversively affected because its use overrides the default behaviour of assistive technology to display content at the top of a document in the viewport or announce content from the start of the document. Users with cognitive disabilites can also be disorientated by unexpected focus movement upon page load.

https://w3c.github.io/html/sec-forms.html#autofocusing-a-form-control-the-autofocus-attribute

User agents should provide a method for users to disable the autofocus attribute behaviour.

Maybe having a "Turn off autofocus behavior" flag on accessibility setting?
Type=Feature seems legit for this bug.

In Firefox you can access it via about:config but that's not sufficient:
  https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1333425

This is one of those cases where I'm not convinced a setting is the right solution. Browsers already have too many settings; how many affected users would actually think to find the setting and change it? I'd suspect that users adept enough to do that would be the ones the least bothered by autofocus.

One alternative idea: perhaps we could communicate autofocus to AT somehow - i.e. let it know the focus reason - and let AT decide whether it wants to ignore autofocus?

I can think of a lot of more interesting settings I'd rather see before this one - for example bringing the focus highlight feature we have on Chrome OS to other platforms too.

> perhaps we could communicate autofocus to AT somehow - i.e. let it know the focus reason - and let AT decide whether it wants to ignore autofocus?

The disadvantages of this are the "detecting AT" issues (privacy and detection-problem concerns) (assuming this means detection)? and additionally:
- we have speech rec which so far as been pretty bad at even following ARIA developments let alone browser options. Dragon seems pretty reliant on its plugin(s).
- 2 places of implementation: as users we need to wait for both a browser implementation of a message and then also all the AT need to be able to understand it and do something with it. This isn't impossible (it's how new ARIA-foo attributes are done currently) but it's now 2 places users need to pester to get anything working instead of one. 
- we have people affected by autofocus who are not running (software) AT. 

A similar argument has been made for text-enlarge: people don't know they can do it in the browser so developers should build text-enlarge widgets. I don't agree with this due to it causing completely different experiences per web page and relying on developers/authors for whether or not we (users) have control over our browsing. Browsers do these sorts of things better than web authors, more consistently.

Honestly there's a small pile of irritating-to-debilitating things that would be great if we could block without turning off/blocking all Javascript (which just isn't an option nowadays anymore): irritating/vertigo-inducing animations (the new media query is awesome though totally in the hands of the authors), scrolljacking, autofocus, parallax, crazy fonts. But autofocus is one that's done by the browser via an attribute, so here's a single place where we could offer user choice.

This issue has been Available for over a year. If it's no longer important or seems unlikely to be fixed, please consider closing it out. If it is important, please re-triage the issue.

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This is still relevant and should be set back to available.

The actual autofocus attribute is just the newer way of doing this. Many pages do this with JavaScript. 

Recommend that this is pushed to screen reader vendors to detect when a page receives focus on load without the user explicitly doing so. They should be able to detect this and announce "autofocused" or provide some helpful hint to users.

I'll send some emails out and see if something can happen on their end.