WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Question About e-Commerce Site: Force Focus or ARIA-Live

for

From: adam solomon
Date: Nov 12, 2010 12:15AM

If focus works for you then I think you should use it, since ARIA is not yet
supported in all current browsers. The problem could arise when you have non
control elements, where focus is not necessarily supported. In that case,
you would try and use anchors and links. Occasionally, the need arises to
send focus in JavaScript to a non control element. The classic way of doing
this is
window.location.href = '#myElementId'
However, I have found that Jaws support for this method is shaky in IE8. The
reader will actually get thrown to the beginning of the page under certain
circumstances.
Therefore, I have gone over to one particular implementation of ARIA which
has good support in current browsers, namely tabindex on non control
elements. Giving the element a tabindex of "0" and then calling focus() to
that element in JavaScript worked for me in FireFox and IE8 for Jaws like a
charm. It is not html 4 standard (no support for tabindex on non control
elements), but I had no choice, and it is accessible for Jaws.
As to the ease of asp.net control ARIA integration, you can always add just
about any attribute you like to the rendering, though not every developer
knows how.(Caveat Emptor: there is a known problem with adding attributes to
ListItems such as in checkboxlist).

On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Elle < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi, all!
>
> Longtime lurker, first time poster. I am working as technical support on a
> very large e-Commerce ASP.NET website, and we are redesigning a
> significant
> area of the site, starting today. I was going into our development with the
> assumption that I should be instructing our developers to use the focus
> path
> when needed to direct the flow for a multiple step process. As there is
> really only one way to get from start to finish on this process, and
> source/tab order will only manage some of that, it still makes sense to me.
> However, I have been reading the recent posts about the value of ARIA in
> defining regions that change dynamically on the page. This isn't a shopping
> cart page, but there might be a good reason to use ARIA for some or all of
> this process for a user. My questions are as follows:
>
>
> 1. What's the best way to determine whether to change the focus or to use
> ARIA-Live assertive for something?
> 2. Is it possible to use both without conflict?
> 3. How troublesome would it be to incorporate ARIA attributes into custom
> .NET user controls?
> 4. What's the best way to encourage a large corporation to use ARIA,
> given the lack of global adoption so far?
>
>
> Thanks very much, all!
>
> ~Elle
> @Nethermind
>