FN-FORUM: accessibility issues... (accesskey mainly)

date posted 6th August 2004 15:02

hi all,

wondered if anyone here can give me a few accessibility tips...

i'm currently building templates for this site:

www.evoke-media.com/sites/had/index.html

it will be powered by a CMS (textpattern probably -
http://www.textpattern.com/), but i'm just doing the template work for
now.


the issue is the news links. according to cynthia
(http://www.contentquality.com/) i need to use accesskey for every
link on the page - which is fine for navigation buttons etc. - but what
do you do when you have a list of links like this? i can see me
running out of keys on the keyboard very quickly! especially with the
full news page that will have between 10 - 20 stories on it!

i don't think accesskey works very well - it wasn't very well thought
out when decided upon! i don't think people are intuitive enough to
use it properly - or even intuitive enough to know how to get around it
to access their OS'es menu shortcuts! (you have to do something like
click alt and *then* the key for menu shortcuts, but hold them together
for accesskey shortcuts...)

to my mind, accesskey is more of an obstacle than an aid to
accessibility.

also alt tags - i have many images that are just fluff - according to
RNIB you should put an asterisk (*) in the alt of an image that is
decoration - but elsewhere i have been told to use empty quotes (" ") -
what's the best method? bobby
(http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp) fails me if i have
empty quotes...

one other thing bobby is failing me for not having suitable contrast -
how does it know?? i guess this is why it's a user check ;-) the
elements on the page look contrasty enough to me! and the page works
great in a text only browser. (i'm getting quite addicted to viewing
pages in Lynx!! i dunno why... !)

lastly, cynthia wants more use of tabindex - though i can't see why i
have to use tabindex in A tags - surely accesskey is sufficient?

any thoughts would be appreciated...

luke

---
Evoke Media Ltd.
t. +44 (0) 870 930 2843
w. www.evoke-media.com
b. www.crea8e.co.uk/blog/

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