TOCs and accessibility

Hi list

Making research for my tutorial, "TOC for XHTML with XSLT",
http://www.xmlplease.com/tocxhtml, I couldn't help but notice that
most of the TOCs for web documents are far from Best Practice. See my
article: "The TOC freak show at W3C and OASIS",
http://www.xmlplease.com/tocw3c.

Let us focus on the most important accessibility issue: the IE focus bug.
http://www.xmlplease.com/tocxhtml#footnote-1

The IE focus bug is mostly considered a "skip navigation" issue. It is
often forgotten that the bug is also with us in documents having a TOC
and if cross-references are used or always when fragment identifiers
are used.

Let us take the spec for WCAG 1.0 as example,
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. The document has a huge TOC and also
very many cross-references. If it is true, and I believe it to be,
that the TOC and the cross-references must be considered indispensable
for navigating the spec in a useful manner, these features must also
work for keyboard users.

Since tabbing to the next link doesn't work when TOC and
cross-references are used in Internet Explorer, the spec of WCAG 1.0,
claiming Triple-A accessibility, must be considered so inaccessible
that it does not live up to any acceptable accessibility level. The
same is the case for probably all major specs and documents at W3C
including the draft for WCAG 2.0, http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/.

How can we ever discuss the finer details of accessibility and of WCAG
2.0 if even the accessibility specs are not accessible for keyboard
users?


Cheers
Jesper Tverskov

http://www.xmlplease.com

Received on Tuesday, 8 May 2007 14:22:57 UTC