WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: building accessible javascript accordions?

for

From: Léonie Watson
Date: Aug 6, 2013 7:16AM

Alastair Campbell wrote:
"Léonie Watson wrote:
> The role of tab causes screen readers (with appropriate ARIA support)
> to announce "tab". That's the cue to switch to using the left/right
> cursor keys to navigate.

I've been reading up on the JAWs and NVDA docs to try and find any reference
to that, and I'm struggling. How would regular users know about it?"

There is definitely much more that all the screen reader vendors could do to
help people learn about these features.

"Admittedly I have a very web-focused outlook, but it's no wonder that a
regular (non technical NVDA) user in testing exclaimed "it said tab, so I
pressed tab!"."

Which is interesting because it was taken as an instruction. Most screen
readers report a link as a link, a table as a table, a list as a list and so
forth. It's logical that a tab would therefore be reported as a tab isn't
it?

"Perhaps a different cue is needed, as it might be people are not expecting
that in a website?"

I'd be cautious about suggesting that. It would be difficult to find a
suitable cue, it almost certainly wouldn't be consistently applied across
screen readers, and it probably wouldn't match with the visual manifestation
which would lead to confusion when collaborating with sighted people.

The problem is how do people learn about these features? Typical
experimentation strategies aren't always successful, there is little
documentation available and people rarely read it when it is.

This isn't a new problem. Do we put a text resizer on the page, do we
provide information on using the browser to resize text, do we look to AT
vendors or third parties to provide the information on how to resize text.

Léonie.
-----Original Message-----
From: Alastair Campbell [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: 06 August 2013 10:51
To: Leonie Watson
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] building accessible javascript accordions?

Léonie Watson wrote:
> The role of tab causes screen readers (with appropriate ARIA support)
> to announce "tab". That's the cue to switch to using the left/right
> cursor keys to navigate.

I've been reading up on the JAWs and NVDA docs to try and find any reference
to that, and I'm struggling. How would regular users know about it?

Left/right generally reads by character, and the only reference to "tabs" in
the user-docs that I can find is for the tab key.

Admittedly I have a very web-focused outlook, but it's no wonder that a
regular (non technical NVDA) user in testing exclaimed "it said tab, so I
pressed tab!".

After reading the Freedom Scientific ARIA doc, the ARIA tab-pattern should
definitely not be used for accordions unless you use role="document" for any
non-form content, as it doesn't expect content in that scenario.


> It's the same cue that screen readers give when encountering a tabbed
> interface in a software application.

Perhaps a different cue is needed, as it might be people are not expecting
that in a website?

-Alastair