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Tab widgets

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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Jul 6, 2011 7:39AM

For those of you who are dealing with, designing, or developing rich internet application widgets, how are you handling tabs interactions?

Do your tab panels change as the user changes focus from tab to tab or do you only update the tab panel when the user selects the tab using the spacebar or enter key?

I am finding advice on using both interaction approaches. I am trying to decide what is optimal. Right now, I am leaning towards requiring the user to press the spacebar or enter key to select the tab. The reason being, if the tab selection triggers an http request to retrieve updated tab panel contents from the server, its possibly going to be confusing to the user if they use the arrow keys to move across the tabs and the panel is being updated slightly behind the current selection. So, you move from tab A to tab B to tab C and, by the time you are on tab C, the content you are seeing is for tab B because the server is moving slow enough that the panel hasn't updated yet.

Thanks!
Tim
Tim Harshbarger
Your Friendly Neighborhood Accessibility Guy
State Farm Insurance Companies