Web Acessibility - tabindex and Access keys

2:32p.m., Mon 9 Jul 2007

A nice post about web accessibility and how easy it is to go overboard is here:

http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=182

Mike Cherim advocates NOT using access keys and attempting to contrive an optimally useful tabindex.

He argues that accesskeys can conflict with other tasks and that few users bother learning to use them if the navigation is marked-up properly.

Cherim's comments mirror those that Steve Faulkner made at a (not so) recent meeting of the London Web Standards Group. Steve warned against the idea of building pages for maximum accessibility and/or screen-readers. The technology advances and what it's trying to do is make simple, standards-compliant webpages more accessible. If pages are coded semantically this makes the job a whole lot easier. Hopefully such measures as access keys should be redundant. They've always felt to me like a wodge of blu-tac over a much bigger problem. If the primary navigation is marked up properly, then why use access keys? For web-based applications that encourage prolonged use over a long period of time I could maybe see the point, but most of the time they feel unnecessary.

Anyway, all this talk puts me in mind of comments from a screen-reader user that were relayed to me. I'm cleaning out my inbox before leaving my current job, so here's the important bits: "Did you know that the first thing many screenreader users do when they get to a website is hit ctrl-F and do a screenfind search for key words they hope might appear on that page … am talking about homepages and content pages here.... screenreader users do not use local navigation at all preferring to hit 'back' and return to a homepage using a 'drill down' approach to find each page. Confidence is low when it comes to searching pages. Also, better to just explore a home page and memorize it's layout than explore every page .... I'd argue that better design, more clever compartmentalisation of info over a page using <h*> tags might kill the above habit."