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forms, tab order, and "cancel" buttons

for

From: deblist@suberic.net
Date: Dec 9, 2009 10:57AM

My organization is in the process of putting up a feedback form,
for which I have provided the relevant information about
accessibility (e.g. WAI-ARIA, tabindex, labels, etc.). One thing
I mentioned about accessibility is that the "Cancel" button
appears immediately to the left of the "Send feedback" button.

To me, this is clearly problematic for keyboard users. Your tab
index, for usability reasons, should match your layout with
left-to-right reading in a case like this, which means that a
casual keyboard user can easily tab to and select the "Cancel"
button instead of the "Send feedback" button. But our web
designer says that having "Cancel" to the left of "Send feedback"
is standard design, and following general layout standards
provides its own benefits for usability.

How do people usually deal with this? A developer doesn't want to
remove the "Cancel" button, because he doesn't want any data in
the form to accidentally send on reload.

-deborah