ACTION Item: Rich review Accordon

A lot of great work by the style guide team!

I am reading the accordion style guide and have a number of questions.
Initial impression is it is too complicated, largely due to the pop-up menu
piece and inconsistencies with tabpanel:

   Why does an accordion have to have a menu? This sounds like an
   additional feature. Anything can have a context menu so why must this be
   specific to an accordion. Shouldn't shift+F10 be the same for all pop-up
   context menus?
   Why does tabpanel not support space or enter to open the panel? James
   Craig said you wanted the behavior closer to tabpanel yet you have an
   inconsistency.
   Why does accordion not support alt+del like tabpanel?
   What are the interactive glyphs on the tab header? Why could these not
   be placed on a pop-up context menu. Seems like it complicates the UI. We
   had a similar discussion with the IBM mashup team.
   Do you have a link to an example we can see on the Monday ARIA call?

Suggestion per the ARIA call this week:

- Give the accordion a role of "tabpanel" but assign it the
aria-multiselectable property. This would indicate to the AT that this was
a multislectable tabpanel which a screen reader could say "accordion." This
menus that multiple tabs could be selected at a time. Authors would then be
required to set the aria-selected="true" on each selected (opened) tab.

I am putting this on the ARIA call for Monday. Addressing accordion is
something we need to do. We would like to do so by reusing existing ARIA
roles and properties.

For quick reference: http://dev.aol.com/dhtml_style_guide#accordion

Rich


Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer

Received on Thursday, 9 October 2008 15:52:37 UTC