There is no SC governing the visibility of focus

Name: Mike Sullivan
Email: mike.sullivan2@qwest.com
Affiliation: Qwest Communications
Document: W2
Item Number: Guideline 2.4: Provide ways to help users with disabilities navigate...
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: There is no SC governing the visibility of focus
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
There is currently no requirement in WCAG 2.0 Draft that the current focus be visible. While the default behavior of showing focus can and should be the responsibility of the user agent, it is possible through CSS to defeat this and have links render without the default halo or any other visual feedback. As a practical example, when examining a site that sells ring tones (http://nextelmedia.sprintpcs.com/NextelDigitalLounge/personalization.do) I found that as I tabbed through the Ringers categories (and elsewhere), there was no indication of which of the twenty-odd links was selected. This page was extremely difficult for a keyboard user to use, and yet there are no success criteria in the current draft of WCAG 2.0 by which this aspect of the page can be said to fail, even at the AAA level. (Since the functionality was technically available through the keyboard, if you kept very careful mental track of the number of times you tabbed, it passed the \"2.1.1 Keyboard\" success criterion.)



Proposed Change:
Add a success criterion similar to the 508 rule 1194.21(c):

\"A well-defined on-screen indication of the current focus shall be provided that moves among interactive interface elements as the input focus changes. The focus shall be programmatically exposed so that assistive technology can track focus and focus changes.\"

Received on Tuesday, 24 July 2007 19:16:39 UTC