Comments for Accessibility Field Notes

Comment on Visibility of the Keyboard Focus: Good and Bad by Paul Ratcliffe

Paul Ratcliffe — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:28:12 +0000

Another example of a site hiding the visibility of the keyboard focus has been brought to our attention - moreactive4life has gone down the road of deliberately suppressing the focus rectangle, making it pretty much impossible for a sighted keyboard only user to use the site. The offending code is line 9 of their CSS file.

Comment on How to complain about inaccessible websites by Paul Ratcliffe

Paul Ratcliffe — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:22:28 +0000

Ouch indeed! A quick look at the site in question shows that a major part of the problem that the user was experiencing on the site was down to the use of CSS to suppress the ‘focus rectangle’ - that thin dotted line that by default Internet Explorer and Firefox put around the element that has the keyboard focus (it’s line 9 of their stylesheet, should anyone want to take a look).

This is a piece of poor practice we at Communis have sadly seen many times before - check out our blog post on keyboard focus visibility back from June 2009. Things like this are simple and cheap to fix for an experienced web developer, and it can make a world of difference to a lot of users!

Comment on SEO and Accessibility Overlap by Liam McGee

Liam McGee — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:47:05 +0000

Nine years (feels like longer) working in the field of accessibility and coming on for five years working in the field of evidence-based SEO. If you have closer look at the article I provide a few references if you want to dig deeper. Thanks for reading!

Comment on SEO and Accessibility Overlap by Mantra SEO dan Aksesibilitas Web - Dani Iswara .Net

Mantra SEO dan Aksesibilitas Web - Dani Iswara .Net — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:26:20 +0000

[...] mesin pencari Internet. Liam McGee mengulas keterkaitan SEO dan aksesibilitas web versi WCAG 2.0 di SEO and Accessibility Overlap (blog Accessibility Field Notes). Lebih rinci lagi poin demi [...]

Comment on SEO and Accessibility Overlap by Captions tell the future - Accessible Rhetoric

Captions tell the future - Accessible Rhetoric — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:59:08 +0000

[...] We don’t tend to talk about closed captions as providing, in some cases, a different (even advantageous) viewing experience over traditional, non-captioned ways of watching movies and TV shows. And yet I think that’s precisely what we need to talk about in order to bring closed captions closer to the mainstream. That’s what Web accessibility advocates do every time they discuss Web accessibility as benefiting everyone, not just users with disabilities. (Two quick examples: consider how Mobile Web Best Practices overlap with Web Accessibility Content Guidelines [e.g. see WAI], and how the practice of optimizing websites for search engines overlaps with the practice of making websites accessible [e.g. see McGee].) [...]

Comment on Skip links: Chrome, Safari and Added WAI-ARIA by Paul Ratcliffe

Paul Ratcliffe — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:09:01 +0000

We like to design using straight (X)HTML and CSS where possible, and only use javascript when it is the only way to achieve something. So, we’ve only enabled the javascript for those browsers where we know that the HTML/CSS approach doesn’t work.

Comment on Skip links: Chrome, Safari and Added WAI-ARIA by Shelagh

Shelagh — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 11:30:06 +0000

Indeed it does, thank you. I was also wondering why you have enabled the javascript for Opera, Safari and Chrome, instead of for “anything that isn’t IE or Firefox”. Are there situations where the javascript might cause a problem?

Comment on Skip links: Chrome, Safari and Added WAI-ARIA by Paul Ratcliffe

Paul Ratcliffe — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:22:48 +0000

Good point on Opera! Opera has a great set of keyboard shortcuts that effectively make skip links redundant (take a look at http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/nomouse/). Our old approach was to make the skip link invisible to Opera. However, this relied on CSS hacks, which can lead to problems when new versions of browsers are released. This new method makes the skip link visible to all browsers, so I’ve tweaked the javascript on the demo so that should an Opera user want to use the skip link it works for them (provided javascript is enabled).

In general, you are right though - of the current ‘big 5′ browsers (IE,FF,Chrome,Safari,Opera) internal links only work in IE and FF unless you augment it with javascript like we have in our example.

Hope this helps, Shelagh!

Comment on Skip links: Chrome, Safari and Added WAI-ARIA by Shelagh

Shelagh — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 15:01:41 +0000

Thank you for this post. May I ask a couple of questions please?

Is there any way to use the javascript in Opera also?

I have read many articles that explain how to make skip links work for keyboard users, but none of the methods work for me except in Firefox and IE. I’ve started to think I’m going mad and that internal links work in these browsers for other people! Am I really going mad, or is there genuinely no html/css way to make internal links work outside FF/IE? If that is the case, how come nobody else seems to be aware of the issue?

Comment on Skip links: Chrome, Safari and Added WAI-ARIA by Liam McGee

Liam McGee — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:05:18 +0000

Hi Wayne - I agree that effective use of heading mark-up combined with use of element navigation in e.g. JAWS removes the need for skip links for some screen-reader users.

However, in our experience of testing users with disabilities, many screen reader users simply do not use the full range of facilities that their software places at their disposal. ‘Power users’ have several navigational strategies they will throw at a page, but less confident users do not - I have watched too many users patiently (and impatiently) sit through yet another repetition of a long list of navigation link - and seen too many praise a site to the skies for implementing a skip link - to feel that they are redundant yet. As a skip link adds greatly to the usability for less confident users, and does not detract from usability for power users, we feel that skip links - well implemented - is the best practice.

Note that the technique does not require any WAI-ARIA techniques (we put ARIA roles in for the sake of perfection).

For sighted, non-mouse users, skip links are a real boon, as Paul mentions in the earlier reply.