Support for keyboard operation -- deserves a Best Practices section?

One of the things that I am impressed with in the way the WAI-ARIA
technology is being developed is the open and constructive way
tradeoffs between visually-impaired and motor-impaired use cases are
discussed and compromises adopted in the Style Guide discussions.

But from our documents, this genuinely cross-disability quality
doesn't leap out at the newcomer, someone with good intentions but
not steeped in accessibility background.

ARIA supports alternate input that emulates the keyboard; ARIA
expects applications to support full operation from the keyboard
alone. But ARIA is entirely dependent on the script author to provide
this keyboard support; there's nothing built into the [X]HTML markup
that makes it happen.

Should we have a section in the Best Practices introducing this as a
general rule?  Our examples should follow this rule, but extrapolation from
the examples is probably not plain enough to get the rule set in
people's minds.

Al

Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2007 15:28:06 UTC