CC krb@, in hopes that this might be easy for him to fix, given his recent knowledge of dealing with tab order mechanisms in the omnibox.

(My naive suggested fix to make sure the home button is on the list of things that can be tabbed to.)

leberly: You can focus the home button by using the F6 to focus the omnibox and then shift-tab. Unfortunately, the F6 shortcut only works on a Chromebook if you enable the "Treat top-row keys as function keys" setting and then counting until you find the sixth button after the esc key, which is not exactly convenient.

pkasting: Do you know why F6 behaves differently to Atl-d and Ctrl/Cmd-L? Would it make sense to make the latter behave like the former? Do you know if there's another way to focus the buttons on the toolbar?

F6 is "accessibility focus", which makes a number of things keyboard-focusable that normally aren't, while the other shortcuts are basically "move the cursor to the location bar".  F6 is the designed solution for this, and I don't think we want alt-d/ctrl-l to inherit its behavior (because it makes tabbing back to the web page, which is a common case, significantly more cumbersome), though perhaps I'm wrong.

I agree that needing to switch the top row to turn the task switcher button to F6 wouldn't be an acceptable solution. Thanks for the insight and input! 

Google Chrome	69.0.3497.21 (Official Build) dev (64-bit)
Firmware Version	Google_Lulu.6301.136.57

Resolving as WontFix after I consulted the documentation. I can reach it using these steps without needing to turn it into F6. 

# Use ctrl + hardware back button to put focus on the Omnibox area
# Use shift + tab to put focus on the home button.

This doesn't work if you use ctrl + l to get to the Omnibox. This matches the behavior of Chrome on desktop.