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Re: Question on keyboard interaction for tabs

for

From: Scott González
Date: Dec 18, 2012 6:09AM


If I remember correctly, the ARIA Authoring Practices will almost always
tell you to treat up/down the same as right/left inside a widget. As has
already been stated, since blind users won't know the orientation, it's
good to handle both. It's also worth noting that the tablist role does not
support aria-orientation.

To take this discussion a little further, there are cases where orientation
does matter, such as menus. If you think of a typical horizontal menubar,
left/right will move through the menu items, while up/down will move
through submenu items. However, the menu and menubar roles don't support
aria-orientation either and vertical menus are fairly common on the web.
Unfortunately, in this case the orientation is important, because you'll
want to change which keys perform which actions.

Then there are cases such as spinbutton, where the ARIA Authoring Practices
will tell you to treat up/down the same as right/left, even though it
doesn't make sense. For editable spinners, you definitely do not want to
override the left and right arrows since those are used to change cursor
position within the current value.




On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 11:09 PM, Maraikayar Prem Nawaz
< <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> 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
> > > >