Re: [css3-ui] scoping 'nav-index' (or tabindex) for large document use cases

Tabindex refers to a particular stricter at a particular time. While some basic structures are static, widget uses are likely to require aria-activedescendant and roving tabindex.

There are some complexities around this area.

This is very much about presentational semantics. It's just mostly about presentation and keyboard navigation.







On Nov 26, 2011, at 4:09 PM, Sailesh Panchang <sailesh.panchang@deque.com> wrote:

> It is not clear why the same functionality is being proposed via
> tabindex and CSS nav-index.
> I even wonder if CSS should do this. After all, tab order relates to
> document structure, meaningful reading / nav order and is concerned
> with semantics. Hence it should be addressed by HTML and its
> attributes not by CSS which, broadly speaking, addresses doc
> presentation / appearance aspects.
> And it will be very  confusing for developers as well as
> QA/accessibility evaluation tools if similar features can be
> implemented by tabindex in HTML and  nav-index in CSS.
> Sailesh Panchang
> www.deque.com
> 
> On 11/20/11, Ojan Vafai <ojan@chromium.org> wrote:
>> FWIW, there's a proposal to extend tabindex with tabindexscope to address
>> the same problem:
>> http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-November/033775.html.
>> I agree that if we're going to add nav-index, we should also address the
>> scoping problem.
>> 
>> On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 3:22 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> One of the issues that came up in the joint meeting between CSS and
>>> WAI Protocols & Formats at TPAC (on October 31) was the 'nav-index'
>>> property in http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-ui/#nav-index .  (This is
>>> the second of two messages (on different topics) to follow up on that
>>> discussion.)
>>> 
>>> There was a brief discussion that both 'nav-index' and tabindex are
>>> difficult for authors to use on large pages.  This was because of
>>> the impression that one of the use cases is likely to be doing a
>>> small amount of reordering of the tabbing order.  In particular, I
>>> think the following two use cases may have been brought up:
>>> 
>>> (1) The author wants to say that the tabbing order (sequential
>>> navigation order) should be assigned a certain way for large
>>> sections of the page, each of which contain many navigable items.
>>> For example, consider two div elements, each with a large number
>>> of links in it, where the author wants all of the elements in the
>>> second div to appear in the tabbing order before all of the
>>> elements in the first div.  This currently requires assigning
>>> tabindex, at a minimum, to all the tab-navigable elements in at
>>> least one of the divs, if not all the tab-navigable elements in
>>> the whole document.  It would be easier if there were a way to do
>>> this by applying styles only to the divs (and perhaps their
>>> container; see item (2)).
>>> 
>>> (2) The author wants to say that the tabbing order (sequential
>>> navigation order) should be assigned a certain way for a group of
>>> elements within a specific container without having to specify the
>>> order for everything else around them.  Right now, saying that two
>>> links inside a div should be reached in the order opposite the
>>> default one, but should appear in-sequence relative to the content
>>> outside of the div, requires not only specifying 'nav-index' or
>>> tabindex on the two links, but also on all the other links in the
>>> document.
>>> 
>>> It seems useful to be able to address these use cases by assigning
>>> properties or attributes to only a few elements rather than having
>>> to do so globally.
>>> 
>>> (Note the desire for the tabbing order to be the way it is may be
>>> the result of positions assigned in the style sheet, which is why
>>> the tabbing order may belong in the style sheet as well.)
>>> 
>>> I don't recall concrete proposals for how to address these issues,
>>> but they seem likely to be worth addressing in css3-ui.
>>> 
>>> -David
>>> 
>>> --
>>> 𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
>>> 𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>

Received on Sunday, 27 November 2011 00:44:02 UTC