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Arrow key navigation for widgets.

for

From: Ramya Sethuraman
Date: Aug 10, 2012 4:33PM


I have a question about how screen reader users detect that a particular
widget supports arrow key navigation. For eg: if I write a custom widget
that contains a list of messages and I want to provide arrow key navigation
through them, do I place some text offscreen telling screen readers users
about arrow key navigation or will they figure it out? I don't know of an
aria role that is relevant to this use case that will make screen readers
announce "Use your up/down arrow keys for navigation"...? For eg: In google
search, how do people figure out that they need to use the arrow key to
navigate through the different search results?

Thanks,
Ramya