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

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From: Emily Ogle
Date: Oct 12, 2018 11:35AM


Certainly I encountered a lot of confusion when training people on the screen reader and said "we should test with and without tabbing." Blank looks. How else do screen readers get by then? That misconception about how screen readers user interact with content also leads to developers panicking that non-interactive content is being missed and adding *everything* to the tab order.

With software, though, where content is not opened within a browser, it becomes much harder to provide multiple ways of navigating.

> On Oct 12, 2018, at 12:23 PM, Steve Green < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> I don't think this misconception arose from incorrect teaching by anyone. It came from people's failure to even attempt to learn, despite the existence of plenty of free and paid-for sources of information and training.
>
> Steve
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Karlen Communications
> Sent: 12 October 2018 18:14
> To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Where Does The Idea Screen Reader Users Use Tab for Main Navigation Come From?
>
> 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
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