WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Where Does The Idea Screen Reader Users Use Tab for Main Navigation Come From?

for

From: Karlen Communications
Date: Oct 12, 2018 11:14AM

One of the by-products of teaching Tab/Shift + Tab as a testing tool is the
misconception that I'm coming across that all we do is "Tab through
content." Somehow those we are training missed the part about links and form
controls and transfer that knowledge to us tabbing character by character,
word by word, line by line and paragraph by paragraph.

I've started including information in workshops and webinars clearly stating
that we have navigation and reading commands, that we don't "Tab through
content" to read digital content and that the Tab/Shift + Tab is for links
and form controls only. In fact, my online courses have a topic devoted to
explaining that we don't use Tab/Shift + Tab to "read" digital content.

Based on this discussion thread, we need to do a better job on explaining
that those of us using screen readers, Text-to-Speech or other adaptive
technology don't "Tab through content" and that there are other keyboard
commands and tools for reading and navigating digital content.

I'd been wondering where this misconception came from.

I don't use the Tab/Shift + Tab scenario, either as a screen reader user or
as a teacher/trainer so apparently missed the general method of testing some
content. I appreciate this discussion as it gives me an insight into how the
misconception gained popularity. I'm one of those people who use the list of
form controls, list of links, list of graphics and so forth to quickly find
thins and orient myself to digital content. One of the reasons I don't use
Tab/Shift + Tab is the endless stream of "more" links, or "Click here" links
that I find which end up confusing me and causing me to wonder if I've
actually moved focus. If I get a list of links and there are a lot of those
types of links, I use Page Down to try to find the end of them. I can also
use this list of links to demonstrate how the links are seen in isolation of
the digital content - where does more take you and why would I want more?

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Jared
Smith
Sent: Friday, October 12, 2018 12:25 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Where Does The Idea Screen Reader Users Use Tab for
Main Navigation Come From?

> If I used tab on this email in Gmail, for example, I would hear an
> expanded menu that says "Show details sub menu" and tab again would show:
> http://list.webaim.org/

Precisely. Those are both interactive elements. This is expected behavior
and exactly what you should hear when hitting Tab.

> So I missed the entire message!

Yep, the message is not interactive or functional, so you wouldn't expect
hitting Tab to cause it to be read.

> This is why tab is not the most useful key command in our navigational
> key toolbox.

Well, it's not useful if you expect it to take you to non-interactive
content (like the text of an e-mail message), but it's a wonderful mechanism
for navigating through interactive elements. So long as testers and users
understand what Tab does and doesn't do, there's no reason not to utilize it
for exploring interactive elements. If they instead want to explore
everything (including interactive elements), then up/down arrow keys is the
right tool for doing that.

Jared
http://webaim.org/discussion/archives