For those of you who have tried getting your site to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines you will most like notices that it is imposible to get your site to follow it exactly. There is one section that makes it imposible to get right, keyboard access, checkpoints 9.4 and 9.5.

Checkpoint 9.4 is to “create a logical tab order through links, form controls and objects.” If you are running dynamic content systems like I am, you just cannot do it, it would meen that every time I added a new post to my blog I would have to change every link in every post on my blog, and even then I would have problems. Every article is on multiple pages, which means that the tab order will be different on each page. I could make a script that would disect the HTML and add a tabindex tag to each of the elements that needs it but for all that is worth I might as well let the browser work out the tab order itself.

Checkpoint 9.5 is “provide keyboard shortcuts to important links, form controls, and groups of form controls.” This one is imposible to do, on my keyboard I have about 35 keys that I can safely use for keyboard shortcuts if I do not want them to get confused with other keyboard shortcuts the browser already has (for example Ctrl and S is Save). I counted 83 elements on my homepage that would need a keyboard shortcut, something just does not add up. My keyboard seems to be missing 48 keys, if anyone finds them please email them to me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Accessibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.