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Re: First letter/number navigation for ARIA Listboxes, Menus, and Tabs

for

From: Bryan Garaventa
Date: Aug 8, 2013 12:33PM

Actually I don't think discoverability would be a problem, since it simply
matches current paradigms for these control types.

For example, the ARIA Listbox literally sounds like a standard Select
element when implemented, which also matches Windows Listbox control
feedback on the desktop. When you are interacting with a standard Select
element, you can do the same thing, press a letter or number to jump to the
item that starts with that character.

The same is true for the ARIA Menu, which matches the standard Windows Menu
functionality, which you can see by right clicking the web page to open a
context menu that literally provides the same type of feedback, as does a
properly formed ARIA Menu. This can be seen by opening the File menu from
any Windows application toolbar to hear the same, and all of these menus
support single letter navigation. The only difference with the ARIA Menu, is
that I programmed it to simply move focus instead of automatically
activating the item, which I think is more intuitive for browsing.

The goal is to make the ARIA Widget behave as closely as possible with the
keyboard functionality of it's standard control counterpart. This will
prevent confusion in the future, since screen reader users will likely never
know that a simulated control is present, if it sounds exactly like a
standard control of the same type. This is why matching keyboard
functionalities is so important.

The Tabs module is one exception where the looping arrow key navigation and
first character keypress doesn't exist in Windows, but I see this as more of
a beneficial optimization, and one that I wish Windows actually provided as
well.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alastair Campbell" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2013 1:29 AM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] First letter/number navigation for ARIA Listboxes,
Menus, and Tabs


> Hi Bryan,
>
> Interesting, at first I thought it would over-ride default key
> commands for Windows based screen readers, but it is only active once
> the user has selected the widget.
>
> I imagine that would be very useful for often-used things like
> Intranets, perhaps less so for public facing sites as discoverability
> of that feature isn't easy without instructions?
>
> -Alastair
> > >