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Re: Question on keyboard interaction for tabs

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Dec 17, 2012 10:17PM

Hi,
Actually the difference between a horizontal and vertical tab list in a web
app, is simply the way the CSS is implemented.

Since CSS styling such as this is totally invisible for blind screen reader
users using JAWS or NVDA for example, the layout for a tab list is whatever
the blind person imagines it to be, since there is no way to know if the
layout is vertical or horizontal.

For this reason, I always include both up/left and right/down as valid
keystrokes, and leave the concept of the layout to be whatever the blind
person imagines it to be.

You can see an example of this at
http://whatsock.com/bootstrap
Where the main tab navigation, and the dynamically generated tabs on the
Tabs tab, are controlled in this manner.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Maraikayar Prem Nawaz" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Cc: "Victor Tsaran" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2012 8:09 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] Question on keyboard interaction for tabs


> Hi All ,
>
> As per WAI Aria Best practices for TabPanel (
> http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#tabpanel ) and
> http://dev.aol.com/dhtml_style_guide#tabpanel , down arrow and up arrow
> navigation should behave the same way as right arrow and left arrow.
>
> My Friend who is also a screen reader user says:
> "it doesn't make sense to use both left/right and up/down arrows to move
> between tabs. If you look at desktop *implementations, you will never up
> and down arrows used to move between tabs, usually only left and right
> arrows."*
>
> Are these conflicting as the screen users would using up/down arrow for
> navigation within the document.
> Should this be split into two as guideline for Horizontal tabpanel and
> Guideline for Vertical tabpanel. Because it for Horizontal tab it makes
> sense to use left and right arrow and for vertical tabpanel to use up
> and down arrow?
>
> Please provide your inputs..
>
>
> Regards
> -Nawaz
> > >