Thread Subject: Re: General Issues: Browser Requirements

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From: Fratkin, Mike
Date: Wed, Jan 10 2007 6:40 AM

We are confronted with this issue daily. It appears that screen readers
have the most keyboard support. Then screen magnifiers have a smaller
subset of those. So screen reader users can navigate to headers very
easily with AT commands. Screen magnification users typically cannot
and keyboard only users are generally left out completely. Table
navigation for keyboard users is another example of where screen readers
provide great navigation capability but then it falls off dramatically
for other users. It would be nice if we could impose some additional
keyboard requirements on browsers.

This could also include the capability to include a keystroke to expose
accessibility options within a browser. We have seen many in-house and
commercial browser based applications that remove menu bars and toolbars
for various reasons. This has two effects on accessibility. One, it
removes capabilities to change text size, ignore colors, change colors,
etc. but at the same time removes browser keyboard conflicts with the
applications that so many developers struggle with.

Mike Fratkin
SSA

[Andi wrote:]

Some have suggested that we might want to impose some requirements on
browser. For example, if browsers provided more keyboard support, ATs
wouldn't have to and users who don't use AT would benefit.

Thoughts on this topic?

Andi

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