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Re: Keyboard menu accessARIA

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From: Joe Chidzik
Date: Jul 6, 2012 2:00AM

> As somebody who has been nearly keyboard-only for 15+ years, it comes
> down to two things: knowledge and UI. Obviously you have no control on
> how much knowledge a user has, however you can dictate what the UI does.
> The key point is controlling focus. If I tab to a nav menu, I expect to hit a sub
> menu or the second main link. If neither happens, I decide how important it
> is to me to get the menu. If it is, I will try arrows, and other things. If you
> clearly define focus, I can tell I am on the second menu item, in the
> content/somewhere else, or still in your /lovely/ menu system (and the JS
> doesn't recognize focus) and I have to use the mouse or watch the status bar
> and hope that you have pretty URLs.
>
> --
> Ryan E. Benson

[Joe Chidzik] Hi Ryan,
Thanks for that, that's useful feedback and good to know a user-perspective on keyboard menu interaction.

I completely take your point about having a clearly visible focus - in fact, I'm going to take SteveF's suggestion, and try and implement an instructional tooltip for keyboard users. However it's good to know that you yourself would fall back to using arrow keys if tabenter did not work in the first instance.

As Steve pointed out too, it should become more commonplace for sites to be using an enhanced keyboard interaction model as time goes on, and HTML5 (and ARIA I guess) become more prevalent on websites, so users will necessarily adapt.

Thanks again
Joe