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Re: Focus on adding/removing items

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From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Mar 24, 2015 12:30PM

Rob, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the problem is that loss of focus is not addressed by the guidelines.

Focus order is (SC 2.4.3). Focus visibility is (SC 2.4.7). But not the simple case of, "Oops, nothing to focus on, so let's take it again from the top!"

I guess we could stretch SC 2.4.8, Location, to cover loss of focus. If you can't find the focus, you can't tell where you are in the page. But that's Level AAA, and this seems like a Level A problem to me.

Worse yet, no matter what success criterion I select for failing this Web content, it won't be a clear fit. And that means I could expect pushback from whoever I must tell, "Keep working. This isn't good enough."

The problem is that we're trying to turn accessibility into a one-size-fits-all checklist. That's a problem because a checklist can't easily accommodate loose ends, and accessibility has many. And it's also a problem because the items we're using for checkpoints—the success criteria—are meant to document ways to succeed, not to pinpoint every possible way to fail.

So what can we measure against? Instead of details, why not focus on the big picture? Use performance objectives:
' A person who is blind must be able to perceive, operate, and understand this Web page and its contents.
' A person who has low moderate vision must be able to perceive, operate, and understand this Web page and its contents.
' A person who is deaf must be able to perceive, operate, and understand this Web page and its contents.
' And so on.

The Guidelines and Success Criteria could then be used as intended—as information to help project teams figure out likely solutions, not as absolute measures of sufficient accessibility.

The ultimate measure of accessibility, then, would be a usability test by people for whom the feature being tested might be a barrier.

Whether I could find a Success Criterion we could use to fail an inaccessible feature would be irrelevant. I would just need to note that our tester found it inaccessible and point the project team to information that might help them solve the problem.

Because the big picture isn't that you should be able to complete some kind of paperwork to document that your site is accessible. The big picture is that your customers should find your content fully usable, regardless of their ability—so usable that they never realize that you had to remove a barrier that would have hindered them.

Cliff Tyllick

Sent from my iPhone
Although its spellcheck often saves me, all goofs in sent messages are its fault.

> On Mar 23, 2015, at 11:28 AM, Robert Fentress via WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Thanks, Sarah. Your analysis is helpful.
>
> I agree that it is a usability issue, though, of course, it has particular
> implications for accessibility. For instance, as you suggest, if an
> interaction causes focus to be lost entirely or causes it to go to the top
> of the page, requiring the user to navigate back to a widget from the start
> of the page, I would think this would be very problematic. My first
> thought was that this would cause a page to violate "WCAG 3.2.2 On Input" (
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#consistent-behavior-unpredictable-change),
> since this would count as an unexpected change of context (
> http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#context-changedef). However, the
> Understanding SC 3.2.2 working group note (
> http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/consistent-behavior-unpredictable-change.html)
> indicates that activating a button is specifically excluded from the list
> of things counting as "Changing the setting of any user interface
> component." Would a page that did this technically violate any WCAG 2.0
> standard that you are aware of? Perhaps SC 3.2.5 would be relevant (
> http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/consistent-behavior-no-extreme-changes-context.html)?
> What do you think?
>
> I ask because I am performing an internal review of a third-party web
> application for accessibility and in several instances focus is lost in
> this way. In my report, I would rather have some specific success
> criterion to point to, so it is not just my opinion about a usability
> issue.
>
> Also, I would like to be able to recommend what the best practice would be
> in these sorts of situations. Right now, I'm thinking the best algorithm
> for deletions would be set focus to the grouped item immediately following
> the item deleted (after a confirmation dialog, which I left out to simplify
> the example), unless there are no more items in the list, in which case,
> focus should be set on the add button. We don't have the resources to do
> formal usability testing, so I kind of have to run the scenario in my own
> head. Here is my thinking:
>
> After deleting an item, what is the user most likely to want to do? It
> might be most reasonable to assume that they want to do something with the
> next item in the list. What could they do? Well, in the example given,
> they could read the link text, follow the link text to view or edit the
> details of the item (unspecified, but assumed), or delete the item. So,
> focusing on the item as a whole, rather than on any component within it
> might be the best balance of directed guidance and flexibility. The user
> might also want to add an item, of course, but moving the focus there would
> seem to be more disruptive, and require more navigation to get to the other
> things the user might want to do. Focus could also be moved to the main
> container for the items, $("#items"), but, again this seems to be
> disruptive, in that it moves the user further away from where they were at
> the initiation of the delete action.
>
> Best,
> Rob
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 4:56 PM, Bourne, Sarah (ITD) <
> <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Rob,
>>
>> Where the focus should go is more a usability issue than an accessibility
>> requirement per se, and may requiring some testing by users to see if
>> you've got it right. As a general rule, you want to put focus back to
>> where the user was in the flow of the page. If it goes to the top of the
>> page, for instance, a keyboard-only user would have to tab all the way back
>> to "items" to continue item management.
>>
>> Since you can't put them back on the delete button once an item is
>> deleted, perhaps it could be replaced with a confirmation statement (maybe
>> with an un-do action even) that the item was deleted. Lacking that, I would
>> think it should go to the next element - the next item link if there is
>> one, or to the add item button. But user testing might show that taking
>> them to the top of the list when at the end is more useful.
>>
>> I can't speak to exactly which ARIA attributes you should use, but I
>> agree with Birkir that using list elements for the items would improve
>> usability, and you would need something so the list and count is updated
>> when items have been added or deleted.
>>
>> sb
>> Sarah E. Bourne
>> Director of IT Accessibility, MassIT
>> Commonwealth of Massachusetts
>> 1 Ashburton Pl. rm 1601 Boston MA 02108
>> 617-626-4502
>> <EMAIL REMOVED>
>> http://www.mass.gov/MassIT
>>
>>
>>