Re: [css3-flexbox] ordering and accessibility concerns

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 3:22 PM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> On 06/20/2012 06:18 PM, John Foliot wrote:
>>> Currently authors can assume that speech, non-CSS UAs, and other
>>> linearized media follow the DOM order. Therefore the best practice is
>>> to put the source in logical order, and to use visual CSS techniques
>>> to perform any reordering that improves the visual layout (since
>>> visual media are 2D and visual elements can be accessed non-linearly
>>> by the viewer). One of the main use cases for visual reordering
>>> features
>>> is thus the ability to *not* affect linearized output. Otherwise, you
>>> might as well reorder the content itself.
>>>
>>> Therefore I strongly believe Flexbox's ordering features should *not*
>>> affect speech output.
>>
>>
>>
>> Except of course when that collides with the low-vision user using a
>> combination of zoom and text-to-speech. Under normal (and current)
>> implementations, those tools follow the DOM order. If you start to
>> rearrange
>> the page's DOM ordered content visually (putting the first DOM node
>> content
>> visually after the 3rd) then the tools like ZoomText will be 'flying' all
>> over the screen focusing on the DOM order content (regardless of the CSS
>> styling), tabbed or not - this is going to be a horrible user-experience.
>
>
> That assumes that the visual reordering is completely random. But usually
> it's not, usually you are using reordering for, e.g. shifting the entire
> navigation section to the left or above the main content. So the ZoomText
> user following source order will be pulled into the main content area,
> skipping over the navigation sections, and then jump back up to the
> navigation
> sections--but that's the *intention*.

Agreed with fantasai here.  Part of the reason for including 'order'
at all was to allow authors to order their source in the best, most
logical way, with the important content up front and the lesser
content later in the document, and then lay it out in whatever way
makes the most sense.  Whether the navigation section appears on the
left or right of the main content section shouldn't matter, but in
today's world it does due to styling limitations, and 'order' lets us
fix that.

So, I'm *for* order affecting tab-order by default, and *against* it
affecting speech order by default.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 25 June 2012 22:57:32 UTC