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RE: Accessibility Observations

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From: Philip Pawley
Date: Feb 27, 2002 10:56AM

Paul,

I have a few caveats to what you said about Netscape and Opera.

1. Netscape: recent releases of Mozilla do support keyboard focus *fully*, so presumably the next Netscape update will do so too. (Also, did you not say in an earlier post that the tab key works for you with Netscape 6.2 and Windows 2000?

2. Opera:
a. Your files work for Opera 5 but not for Opera 6.
b. Any page that includes a form fails to tab properly even with Opera 5: the form captures the keyboard focus and will not let go.
c. Even when it does work, the tabbing order is the order that appears on the page (not the HTML order). You can see that in your second file.
d. The "tabindex" attribute has no effect in Opera 5.

Sorry to be picky, but I think we can help each other by pointing out any gaps in each others' experience.

All the best,


At 26/02/02 20:12 -0700, you wrote:
>With CSS positioning, the tab order will be the same as the reading (or
>listening) order. I added some links to my test files so that you can
>see how the tab order changes when the div tags are rearranged. (Note:
>the links are dummy links that don't go anywhere.)
>
>The div tags work fine in Internet Explorer and Opera. In Netscape (both
>4.x and 6.x) the particular kind of style that I used in these files
>causes the keyboard accessibility to fail. This is a Netscape bug which
>has been around for a while. The truth is that Netscape has never been
>very keyboard-friendly. Most people who depend upon keyboard use will be
>using a non-Netscape browser.
>
>Here are the links to the test files again:
> http://www.webaim.org/paul/css-linearization
> http://www.webaim.org/paul/css-linearization2
>
>Paul Bohman
>Technology Coordinator
>WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind)
>www.webaim.org
>Center for Persons with Disabilities
>www.cpd.usu.edu
>Utah State University
>www.usu.edu
>
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