Archive for the ‘Accessibility’ Category

ARIA is showing a lot of promise. It will allow us to have our cake and eat it too… an exciting, yet accessible web.

ARIA has recently reached a fairly robust-looking draft. Considering decent support for ARIA exists in current and upcoming browser releases, I felt it was time to get my knowledge and widgets up to speed.

My first foray into ARIA is a revamped Compact sections DHTML widget. This version includes ARIA roles, states/properties and improved keyboard navigation as per ARIA best-practice.

Using the elephant’s outstanding ARIA plugin for jQuery made the integration fairly trivial.

Playing with keyboard navigation and tabindex proved messy, but with a little patience, most of the creases were ironed out.

I’m still not entirely certain I’m managing focus correctly.

For example: Whenever a tab is activated, I’m returning focus to the tab. This seems to be consistent with best-practice, but in terms of reading order a user may then be presented with the rest of the tabs before reaching the tabpanel content. In this case, I wonder whether using the flowto property may help direct the user straight to the tabpanel content?

I’d appreciate any ideas if you know how it should be done.