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Re: keyboard accessibility

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From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Jan 29, 2015 11:53AM

Angela, it depends on how well the page is coded. That one is not great, for example. On Firefox, using the mousless browsing add-on, I can get to the submenus if I am very very very fast, but I certainly can't get into those submenus with native Firefox or without some kind of time limit. There is a lot of discussion on this list (you can look in the list archives) about how to make dynamic menus keyboard accessible, but on that page, they aren't.

There are ways to jump from heading to heading in certain browsers without a screen reader, but they are poorly documented, poorly understood, and usually require some kind of add-on. (They are native in the old version of Opera; in Firefox you need a specific extension.) In general, a keyboard user who wants to move around the page faster than that might use something like Mouseless Browsing, Find as you Type, Caret Browsing, or some other way of jumping around the page quickly. We won't use native page semantics because they aren't exposed by the browsers very well.

Deborah Kaplan


On Thu, 29 Jan 2015, Angela French wrote:

> I'm a sighted user and just wondering how keyboard-only users navigate through a page.
> Here is the page that raised the question: http://www.governor.wa.gov/ . Is there a way to tab into the sub menus that are exposed when mousing over the top nav items?
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> Also, there are blocks of content on the page and each has its own heading. However, if I tabbed to get to the Twitter block of content, how do I easily get out of it if I'm a keyboard only user? I wouldn't want to have to tab through every tweet to move onto the next block which contains the Facebook posts.
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> Are there any resources you might refer me to to learn more about how keyboard-only users interact with pages?
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> Thanks,
> Angela French
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