/Access all areas/ huntforproperty.ie
27/10/2006 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas
The Disability Discrimination Act places obligations on place to provide an accessible service. Alastair Campbell tries out www.huntforproperty.ie
It’s wonderful to see the steps towards accessibility that have been undertaken by www.huntforproperty.ie, a fairly large and complex site. A note of commendation should be given to the excellent use of (nested) headings to convey document structure on this site. The underlying HTML uses all the right elements and there are no stand-out accessibility bloopers, so in this issue we can focus on a refinement of one of the details.
There are several places where the developers are obviously well aware of the accessibility guidelines but may not be aware of the best solutions. For example, the use of the tabindex attribute in this case is likely to be more confusing than helpful.
There are several groups of people that typically need to use keyboard access – those with motor impairments and those using a screen reader, for example.
The tabindex attribute can be applied to links and form elements to control the order of tabbing through a page. This can be particularly useful when you’re using a complex form, but in regular pages it over-rides the default order of tabbing through a document.
For a screen reader user there are two main methods of traversing around a page – the arrow keys to explore all the content, and the tab key for links and forms.
The problem with using tabindex on all pages is that the tab order goes through the elements with tabindex first, then continues through the rest of the links and forms starting from the first one that does not have a tabindex specified.
In this way, someone who explores a page with a screen reader using the arrow keys will find the login form followed by the navigation, then the property search. Using tab, the order is very different. It also misses the ‘forgot your password’ link.
Using tabindex should not be undertaken lightly; if you use it, you have to specify many tabindeces, and on a site that has good code order, such as www. huntforproperty.ie, it really isn’t needed.
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