WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

tab not working in table, arrow keys work and table navigation as well (in Jaws and NVDA), any advice?

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Jan 26, 2012 1:24AM

Good morning wise ones (writing from Iceland with 40mph wind and 20
inches of snow).

There has been a significant rewrite of our search page recently
(National Library for the Blind), unfortunately done without proper
testing and evaluation, something I am trying to remedy, but only have
24 hours before we have a meeting with our users.
If you go to http://hbleit.bbi.is
you will find the search page.
If you input "Tolkien", for instance, in the search field (leita, also
the first edit field on the page), and press enter, you will get a
table of search results.
As I understand it (I am blind), this is a table of 4 columns and the
fifth has 3 subcolumns in it, which are buttons that allow users to
download (hala niður), order a CD (panta á disk) and add to wishlist.
These are actually marked up by ARIA to be buttons, even if they are
some type of fancy graphics (apparently much appreciated by the
dyslexic users).
The table is created using DevExpress, if anyone is familiar with it,
then padded with Javascript.
The problem we are having is that navigating this table using the tab
key (with Jaws and NVDA) will put you in column 1 (sjá meira/read
more), then column 3 (author´s name) and finally column 4 (ritröð/is
book part of a series).
The tab key skips over the title column (titill), and the 5th column
containing the actionable buttons (download etc).
Using the arrow keys to navigate the table, or table navigation keys
(alt-ctrl-arrows in NVDA or table naviation mode in Jaws 13), works
perfectly.

This was not the case a few days ago, so some changes made through
DevExpress messed this up.
I will, of course, sit down and look at the underlying code today to
try and figure out what what the problem is.
If anyone knows why this could be happening, it would be of tremendous help.
Thanks very much, and have a great day.
-Birkir