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Re: Current best practice/standard/guideline for linking to non-html files?

for

From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Oct 22, 2014 10:56AM

The only way I have found to get out of a PDF document in IE at least
is to press alt-f4 and then select to "close current tab" button.
ctrl-f4 does not work for me when the browser is showing a PDF
document, it works fine for a webpage.
I know we are straying into specifics here, but the point is that
users need to open native applications to read most non-html files.
However browsers increasingly provide plug-ins for viewing these files
by default, and often those are not accessible and can even cause
serious accessibility issues.

Users can become trapped in the browser and end up giving up on the
page altogether
I wish indicating that a link points to a file was at least a AA
requirement, because I think this causes a lot more confusion for
users than when a page opens in a separate window (after all the
screen readers themselves could usually announce this if they see a
link with target="_blank", if the opening is done via Javascript they
would not announce this, the same applies to a file download link to a
degree).
But bottomline is that WCAG does not cover that scenario within any of
its A or AA requirements, not even in the most creative intrpretations
I have been able to come up with (and when I work with clients I try
to be pragmatic rather than creative, personally I sometimes still try
to see how I could call something under WCAG A or AA success criterion
if I really wanted to).

Cheers
-Birkir


On 10/22/14, Bim Egan < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Thanks for that suggestion Don, I did try F6, which works for web pages,
> but in the version of Internet Explorer rendering other formats, I ended
> up trapped in the address bar. I'll try it in combination with the
> Control key.
>
> Bim
>
>
> On 22/10/2014 14:29, Don Mauck wrote:
>> Bim --
>> The one suggestion I might give regarding getting back out of the toolbar
>> and into the document is to try a CTRL+F6, then hit the tab key usually
>> three or four times, see if that works. This has always worked for me
>> when I have any screen reader that seems to lose focus. I don't know if
>> that's what's happening here, but it's just a thought.
>>
>>