Why aren't some UAC prompts immediately keyboard-navigable by default?

Question

Is there a way to force all Windows 10 UAC prompts to be immediately keyboard-navigable by default?

When UAC prompts pop in Windows 10, my preference is to use the keyboard to choose (tab/shift-tab + enter); it's faster, no mouse necessary. Half the time, this works fine. The other times, however, I have to manually click into the UAC prompt, as if the UAC prompt didn't pull focus into it by default, at which point I just use the mouse to choose an option since I'm having to use it anyway.

Is there a reason this happens, why some UAC prompts don't pull keyboard/mouse focus into them by default? And more importantly, can something be done to force all UAC prompts to be immediately keyboard-navigable by default?

Answer 1

IIRC, this behavior somehow depends on the host process that requests the UAC elevation and there is no way to change this natively.

I have written a simple AutoHotKey script that switches focus to the UAC window when it appears: https://github.com/lightproof/UAC-Focus

As a side note, for a non-localized (i.e. english) Windows UI you can use Alt+Y and Alt+N instead of Tab and Enter to explicitly answer Yes or No to the UAC prompt. For a localized UI, the letter corresponding to each option can be found out by pressing Alt twice while UAC window is open.