WAI-ARIA authoring: About 4.3 Changing reading order

WG,
Refer to  WAI-ARIA authoring practices
http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-wai-aria-practices-20100916/
Item 4.3 Changing reading flow
In the following example, the navigation would follow the order of "Top News Stories", "television listings", "stock quotes", and "messages from friends"
by following (X)HTML document reading order. However, the author or end user may determine that the main content is most important, followed by "stock
quotes", "messages from friends", and then "TV listings."

Comment
If the end user wishes to follow a different reading order, he cannot change the code and add aria-flowto but has to review the headings / landmarks and navigate to the desired section of the page. Proper structural markup will support such navigation. 
Does above text suggests that end user is in control and can set aria-flowto attribute?
 
And if the author intends that a different reading order is more appropriate or logical, then why code it in a different order to begin with?
Consider a newspaper. The headlines  that scream out the top news story / breaking story are at the top center of the page for a reason, right? It does not appear in the bottom right section.
In a top-down-right to left order system, the reading and tab order  should follow this pattern.
If a sighted keyboard user experienced the tab going  to  the main content, then the right side content then the footer content and then the left content he would be perplexed. It is not predictable at all and can different from website to website or even Web page to Web page. If landmark based navigation is possible for a sighted user (like it is for a screen reader user)  and some landmarks are skipped over, then that too will be confusing.  
I think this is a poor example for a case where reading / tab order should be different from coding order. 
Finally, aria-flowto is not supported by browsers and AT as of today.
I am not familiar with model based authoring  paradigm and cannot  comment about the need to change reading flow.

Thanks,
Sailesh Panchang
Accessibility Services Lead
www.deque.com

Received on Thursday, 21 October 2010 16:10:51 UTC