Re: [External Sender] <ol start="3"> Is this accessible?

> In the beginning of flex box support it behaved in Firefox the way you prefer - but this was a bug and it is fixed now.

I assume you are correct that it is correct as specced, but I think that it is creating problems.

We have 3 routes through content:

  *   Visual order.
  *   Tab order (which can be followed visually or via screenreader).
  *   Content order (primarily order for screenreader usage).

When you manipulate the visual order via CSS, the source-code order doesn’t change, therefore the orders do not align.

There are legitimate reasons to change the visual order, including the examples in the article I linked to previously, mostly to do with responsive changes at different viewport sizes. You can’t hand-wave that away as a problem with the content, see the quotes from the Filament group as well.

It means you (as a developer) cannot keep the orders aligned, and there will inevitably be issues for keyboard and/or screenreader users.

Either flexbox & grid are useful and powerful methods of adjusting the visual display, or we should always match the content and visual orders. It can’t be both.

If we agree on that, the solutions are either work-arounds by developers (do they exist?), or user-agents could implement a mode that follows the visual/css order instead of the source-code order.

-Alastair