RE: Floating Action Buttons

My recommendation is to have multiple ways to reach:

  *   Keystroke
  *   Semantic role such as region where screen reader users could navigate to and also understand bounds
  *   Skip to link on page such as at the top so the user can quickly jump to it and also make it’s presence known

Jonathan

From: Mike Elledge <melledge@yahoo.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 1, 2020 5:55 PM
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: Floating Action Buttons

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Hi Everyone--

I've been asked if there is a way to implement accessible floating action buttons (FAB) as in Google Material Design.

An example would be a floating map button that provides directions. Another would be a floating link that takes the user to the top of a page (leaving aside the potential confusion if it is styled like a button).

There are pros and cons to using them, but it would seem to be a problem wrt accessibility.  In particular, how would a keyboard or screen reader user navigate to an object without a fixed location?  I thought of accesskeys, but their use is frowned on because of potential conflicts with shortcut keys.  Having an FAB appear after a number of keystrokes, time, or sentences sounds intrusive and arbitrary.  Putting them in a fixed position on a page seems to defeat their purpose.  I also thought of claiming equivalence if there is an existing keystroke that accomplishes the same thing, but that doesn't feel right.

Am I missing something?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Mike Elledge