WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Intuitiveness of JAWS jump to tabpanel shortcut for ARIA Tabs in FF?

for

From: Léonie Watson
Date: Jul 4, 2014 8:39AM

Birkir R. Gunnarsson wrote:
"That being said, yes, the lack of standard traditions for keyboard widgets
is trouble for accessibility for both screen reader and keyboard only
users."

There are some useful design patterns that include keyboard interactions in
the ARIA authoring practices:
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/

"For instance, should users always expect to be able to use their arrow keys
to move between tabs in a tablist, an the tab key will only move focus to
the active tab?
I like this pattern if it weren't for the fact that it is not obvious to me
and not consistent across all websites."

Discovery is possibly the biggest challenge. It isn't helped by the fact
that little changed on the web for a long time, so people rarely had to
figure out new forms of interaction. Screen readers don't explain how to use
links for example.

The fact that Jaws explains what the command will do when it encounters
aria-controls is unusual. It's triggered by a relationship, but announcing
only the existence of the relationship wouldn't be helpful to users, so it
explains what will happen when you invoke the key command instead. I'm not
sure the same thing would work, or even be desirable in other contexts?

Things can get even more confusing with tabbed widgets. When a screen reader
announces "tab", is it a name or an instruction?

In terms of general keyboard interaction it's even more complicated, because
there isn't anyway for the screen reader to determine what keyboard handling
has been provided. Even if there were, that would offer no help to sighted
keyboard users in any case.

Léonie.


--
@LeonieWatson Carpe diem