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Tabbing and the hover event

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From: Mike Osborne - AccEase
Date: Oct 2, 2008 4:20PM


We are currently assessing/testing the accessibility of party political
sites in New Zealand - are they interested in getting their information out
to all the voters?



One site www.national.org.nz <http://www.national.org.nz/>; uses CSS-style
dropdown menus (no Javascript) in the main menu bar. One of our testers is a
keyboard-only tester (no mouse) and was asking if there was a key
combination that would initiate the dropdown. Are there any?



It occurred to me that when using the tab key to navigate from link to link,
shouldn't the browser be firing the hover event (the link has focus)? I
think this would be quite useful - then any hover highlighting would be
available to keyboard users - not just the hard-to-see dotted outline you
get with a link in focus now. Is this a good idea? If the browser can fire
an event to display an outline, it can't be that hard to also fire the hover
event. Any browser developers out there care to comment?



Regards
Mike Osborne

AccEase Ltd
p. 04 934 2821
m. 021 675 010
e. <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> > <EMAIL REMOVED>
w. <http://www.AccEase.com>; www.AccEase.com



All the information for all the people all of the time.