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Re: Shockwave keyboard focus

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Oct 20, 2004 7:54AM

> In the past we've distributed self-assessment questions to students on
> CD-ROM, and have put a great deal of effort into making these fully
> accessible. We've recently decided to attempt to put these on a website
> instead, and are falling down at the first accessibility hurdle -
> keyboard navigation.

Don't expect smooth sailing after this hurdle either. You might want to
carefully consider your delivery mechanism. It is possible to use the
Director self-voicing features to make the content accessible to visually
impaired users after this challenge, but it is not a trivial undertaking.

> My problem is this. You open the html page in Internet Explorer with
> the shockwave object and the shockwave object has keyboard focus - all
> is fine. You switch to a different application (using mouse or Alt-TAB)
> then back to the html page. Now the browser window, not the html page,
> has focus and I can't seem to shift the focus back to the shockwave
> object. The tab key is about the only thing that the shockwave is
> picking up, but not things like RETURN to activate a button. All works
> fine again if you click on the shockwave object. I'd really like to see
> it work like Flash, where you tab in, through, and out of the object
> easily.

Can you post a link - I'm sure others would be interested to see. I'm not
entirely clear on what you are describing - the focus goes to the browser,
not the html but the shockwave asset is able to pick up the tab keystrokes?
Can you clarify?

> The only "solution" I have at the moment is to do CTRL-I quickly twice
> as this opens and closes the Favourites panel and leaves the focus back
> in the shockwave object at the end of it. Personally I think this is a
> bit flakey and don't really want to let end users have to do it.

Yeah, we might not want to advocate this as a universal standard!

AWK

--
Andrew Kirkpatrick
Project Manager, WGBH National Center for Accessible Media
125 Western Ave.
Boston, MA 02134

617-300-4420 (direct voice/FAX)
617-300-3400 (main NCAM)
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