WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Disabled elements need keyboard focus?

for

From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Feb 23, 2017 2:38PM

Another consideration...

People (with and without disabilities) will be using a computing environment and they will become use to the default behaviours of that environment. So those default or native behaviours become part of the user's expectation of how user interfaces work. There might be situations that warrant overriding the default behavior, but those should be rare. I would actually only want to override those behaviours if I had some solid data that users were having trouble with that particular interaction--most likely data from a usability test.

Honestly, most of the time accessibility experts don't have direct access to things like usability tests to make informed decisions--so we have to make decisions or suggestions based on what we know or think we know. That means it is fairly easy to assume users will have problems when they won't or that they will have no problems when they will. Logic used to build a theoretical idea of what problems users will experience should be carefully considered.

We shouldn't avoid doing this--because it is sometimes all we have available to base our guidance on--but we should be mindful of its pro's and con's.

Thanks,
Tim