Use of tablist role for tabbed content

Hi all,

Recently I've been doing research on how to tackle accessibility for a
typical set of "tabbed content", where are page with lots of content is
split into smaller tabs. I believe this may have come up in the past but I
have a few additional concerns.

I understand that the WAI-ARIA design pattern is the most preferred
approach (https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#tabpanel) as it's used
to emulate native OS behaviour. This is great, however:

   - How well does this translate to mobile devices? What about larger
   touch only devices?
   - Wouldn't the change in keyboard behaviour confuse an inexperienced
   sighted keyboard user?

Is it that we may be using the tablist role incorrectly? Tablist sounds
like it's more suited to creating rich web applications (similar to
menubar). Maybe we should be using a simpler aria-expanded="true|false"
style approach for content based tabs instead?

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance,
Paul

-- 

Paul Sandwell


UI Team Lead
*HeathWallace*
Email: paul.sandwell@heathwallace.com
Phone: +44 (0)118 9561 757
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=79070203

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