RE: Use of tablist role for tabbed content

Hi,
The ARIA Tablist pattern does work well across both desktop and mobile, however what you are describing sounds more like an Accordion control, is that correct?

An Accordion construct is much easier to implement and doesn’t require an advanced keyboard paradigm.

An example of this code is included in the archive at
https://github.com/w3c/aria-practices

(View the Accordion folder in Examples)

The following screen reader test page documents the majority of such widgets as these for testing across desktop and mobile devices
https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/aria-widget-checklist-screen-reader-testing/


Accordions are numbers 4 and 5, and Tabs are number 19.

All the best,
Bryan


Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility Fellow
SSB BART Group, Inc.
bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com
415.624.2709 (o)
www.SSBBartGroup.com

From: Paul Sandwell [mailto:paul.sandwell@heathwallace.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2017 2:33 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: 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<mailto:paul.sandwell@heathwallace.com>
Phone: +44 (0)118 9561 757
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