WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Must elements with onclick handlers be focusable?

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Jul 22, 2014 6:41AM

Alistair, this is a good question and one that we have to weigh the cost of before making a decision. In our Accessibility Management Platform (AMP) we have a type of automatic violation called a "guided automatic" violation. These are potential violations that the automated checker finds but these violations are not marked as failures unless a human specifically marks them as a failure.

Use of onclick is a significant barrier and use without other events signal a very highly likelihood that there would be an accessibility issues. So if these were not flagged by a checker then all of them would need to be located manually and tested manually. With guided automatic violations the human doesn't need to locate all of these as the checker has already done that. Thus, the tester only need manually validate them. This saves time and if you were manually testing you'd have to check all of them too.

When we consider automatic testing we try to work smarter and not harder -- that is, we try to find potential issues that are likely to be accessibility issues and warn the tester. Occasionally some items are indicated as automatic failures that are not but the effort to test these is less than the amount of work to manually locate and inspect all of the items without an automatic check. Platform's such as AMP can also detected issues that occur across pages or identify issues that are likely to be global issues across a site. Being able to identify issues that are global or patterns is a key feature we use to efficiently audit web pages. The amount of testing that is needed is very large compared to the human resources that are available and thus we need to find the correct balance between automated/semi-automated tools and human inspection to effectively and accurately validate web accessibility.

Good accessibility checkers will also allow you to filter out certain XPaths and/or update tests. For example, organizations can update their own AMP tests and in this case you could ignore elements with onclick that have descendants that have an onclick coupled with a device independent handler.

Jonathan