Comment 8 for bug 228343

Correction to my above post: the Next Panel binding does in fact select the panel highlighted, and defocus the current window!
However there is no highlighting of the panel to indicate this, and in addition actually doing anything with the panel is tricky.
So far if I:
 * Select the panel using Next Panel (e.g. Ctrl-Alt-period), the current window is defocused and the panel is selected
 * Press tab to cycle through elements in the panel
Only some of the items in the panel show the dotted-line highlighting. It's quite tricky to see when you've selected the indicator applet element for example (see bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libindicator/+bug/519195: sometimes pressing left/right seems to just select the username and icon, and sometimes it drops down the menu) - the net result is you can get lost fairly easily.