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RE: keyboard access [was Re: Sample Sites]

for

From: Jukka Korpela
Date: Sep 1, 2002 11:02PM

Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:

> When I first started looking at the
> checkpoints I thought they were meant to be in order of ease of
> implementation.

I think many of us have thought that way, and I'm afraid most people who
have heard about the guidelines keep thinking that way. After all, it's a
fairly natural assumption. But if we take a look at the guidelines closely
enough, then it should be obvious that e.g. the priority 3 guideline
"Identify the primary natural language of a document" is _much_ easier to
implement than the priority 1 guideline "Clearly identify changes in the
natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g.,
captions)". It's basically a matter of adding a single attribute to a tag
versus adding quite some attributes and auxiliary markup (plus indicating
language changes inside alt attributes, which is _impossible_).

As an implication, WCAG 1.0 priorities alone are not a sufficient basis for
accessibility strategy. That is, it would be irrational to make it the
primary objective to satisfy priority 1 requirements and only after that
consider priority level 2, then priority 3.

As regards to keyboard access, the techniques discussed in WCAG 1.0 have
been overemphasized. Both accesskey and tabindex attributes are of fairly
limited and debatable usefulness. It is much more important to avoid
creating a situation where the normal sequential tabbing order is not
convenient than to try to fix some of the problems (and cause some other
problems) using tabindex. Similarly, it is much more important that a form
can be filled out in the natural sequential order than to provide access
keys for jumping around a form.

> (Because it's pretty easy to add an alt attribute!)

But it's sometimes _very_ difficult to add an adequate alt attribute. And
even in simple cases, even if authors really try hard, the results can be
rather useless, as indicated e.g. by the howlers at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7eflavell/alt/alt-text.html#howlers
Of course, most of the time on most sites, adding alt attributes is smooth
sailing _if_ you understand what alt is for and especially if you write
those attributes when creating pages (rather than fixing them afterwards).
But there are tough cases as well, like content-rich graphs and charts. And
the guidelines and rules require that _every_ image have an alt attribute;
not just the majority, which is easy.

> Recently, however, I've been more and more aware of how hard
> (expensive?) it can be to accomplish Priority One on a site with video
clips.

It can surely be expensive, and the situation is rather frustrating.
Consider, for simplicity, a site that is essentially text only and to which
some video clip is added to illustrate some point explained in the text. A
site that complied at priority level 3 would stop complying even at priority
level 1, unless you "provide an auditory description of the important
information of the visual track", for example.

--
Jukka Korpela, senior adviser
TIEKE Finnish Information Society Development Centre
http://www.tieke.fi
Phone: +358 9 4763 0397 Fax: +358 9 4763 0399


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