There are several common use cases for wanting to get the keyboard focus owner in a scene. Two common ones are for the authoring tool and accessibility.

The proposed solution to this would be to promote impl_getFocusOwner to public API, but it looks like it may not be so trivial. Currently, the focus owner is handled in a couple different ways in Scene.java:

    /**
     * Gets the scene's current focus owner node.
     *
     * TODO: probably should be removed in favor of impl_focusOwner below.
     *
     * @treatasprivate implementation detail
     */
    public Node impl_getFocusOwner() {
        return getKeyHandler().getFocusOwner();
    }

    /**
     * The scene's current focus owner node. This node's "focused"
     * variable might be false if this scene has no window, or if the
     * window is inactive (window.focused == false).
     *
     * TODO this was added because of RT-3930. This needs to be reconciled
     * with impl_getFocusOwner(). We don't need both. Exposing a variable
     * is more powerful because it allows code to bind to it.
     *
     * @treatasprivate implementation detail
     */
    //
    private @GenerateProperty Node impl_focusOwner;

So, there seems to be opportunity here to clean things up in addition to exposing public API.