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Compliance
Hi Guys, and Gals! Hope you had a great Christmas and looking forward to a prosperous and happy New Year.
I do a few websites for local Parish Councils which have until Sept 2020 to ensure that their website meet the requirements in place for accessibility.
Having waded through the usual government legalise which is as clear as mud I find failure in only a couple of areas. Pictures are required to display Alt text to be readable by computer reader: no problem. Contrast of text/background should meet the "pass level" required: no problem. Fonts to be clear and of a size and style that is easily readable (no actual spec of course!): no problem.
The main problem is the requirement that the site can be navigated with keyboard only. I have tested several sites starting from the address bar and tabbing from input/ hyperlink to input/hyperlink but there appears to be no sequence that the tab follows. I assume that someone using the keyboard only would also use it in conjunction with a reader.
Am I missing something or is it an impossible dream for the PC brigade?
Most appreciative of any comments or ideas or pointers.
Cheers,
Ken
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Re: Compliance
You have the option of coding in tabindex="number" to force the order to follow any number of ascending values of tabindexes.
I have found you can code this in using unique IDs and then Javascript to add in the tabindex attribute and required value (e.g., ID of ti4 would insert Attribute tabindex="4").
This is messy and if there are a large number of elements, hard to manage.
The better way is to ensure that your objects are in the right order in the Page & Layer gallery.
I select the one to be on the bottom (last) with Ctrl+F and work upwards to the top.
The resulting HTML should then be in a logical order for keyboard tabbing.
You should then be able to tab logically through a form or NavBar.
In HTML5, any element can be given a tabindex. This makes the element focusable (typically a blue border box), which may not be the effect you are after and it has a serious downside of overriding elements without tabindexes so screen readers may jump over links, fields and buttons unless you can plan it all out clearly.
Acorn