WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Is this slider accessible to screenreader users?

for

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Dec 7, 2009 10:39AM

Al Sparber wrote:
> From: "Christian Heilmann" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>
>
>> Keith Parks wrote:
>>
>>> On Dec 7, 2009, at 8:53 AM, Al Sparber wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> Hi Randi,
>>>>
>>>> Try this page and let me know if you are able to read all of the
>>>> content:
>>>> http://www.projectseven.com/products/tools/horizontal-glider/accessibility/base.htm
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> The "Poems" tab goes to Poems, but the "Novels" tab brings you to
>>> "Movies", and the "Movies" tab goes to nowhere, in Safari at least.
>>>
>>> But at least it *is* keyboard navigable.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> To a degree. It is tab-able but not really usable with a keyboard. The
>> cursor keys is what makes it a proper tab control.
>>
>> If we want to use ARIA and we want to build interfaces that are the same
>> as rich client interfaces we also have to get away from the idea of
>> tabbing as the way to access data on the web. Todd Kloots did some
>> amazing research work in this area:
>>
>> http://ericmiraglia.com/blog/?p=132
>>
>> The roaming tabindex for example makes sure you can access a massive
>> menu without tabbing 200 times:
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#focus_tabindex
>> http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/02/23/managing-focus/
>>
>
>
> To be honest, we're not completely sold on ARIA at this point in time. It's
> interesting to view as a future solution. Our accessibility testing group is
> small, but comprised of people who have real disabilities and we tend to
> keep things as simple as possible. While our results tend to sometimes be at
> odds with specifications authors, they do seem to work well for actual
> users. But then again we are not sold on AJAX either. If we were, we would
> likely be far more compelled to embrace ARIA and the like.
>
> Our "carousel" was just released so we are still fleshing out potential
> accessibility updates. Hopefully, any tweaks we make can be as simple as
> possible :-)
>
>
Great. We throw all this information above out for free and write the
explanations for exactly that use case. There is not much sense in 40
people all doing the same research and arguing results. But then again
this is the impression I get of the accessibility world as a whole as
otherwise we'd have much more open source products.