note from May 12th call

Hello,

These are the unedited notes from the May 12th conference call. 
During this meeting we focused on the navigation section
of the user agent guidelines. Several questions came up
that were not easily resolvable, so please review the 
guidelines and forward your suggestions to the list.


May 12, 1998

Present
Jon Gunderson 
David Poehlman
Tom Linkowski 
Madeline Rothberg
Marja-Riitta Koivunen  
Kathy Hewitt
Kitch Barnicle 
Jim Allan
Ian ?
Gregg Vanderheiden

Navigation

Section Heading: Sequential Navigation (one item at a time)

Some browsers allow movement by elements -  headings, links, 
paragraphs, etc

Add: include images with longdesc and frames into keyboard 
sequence,
Q: Should we suggest specific keyboard commands? Probably cannot 
do that.

Q: Do we need to make a suggestion regarding navigation through 
frames?  Some screen readers do not follow focus across frames.  This 
may be a screen reader issue since the focus does seem to move 
"visually".

Question: Should tab automatically take user into a form control?

Section Heading:  hierarchical navigation

"Keyboard commands to navigate a hierarchical representation of the 
document."

Add: Keyboard and mouse commands to navigate.

Question: What would/could be included in hierarchy / outline? 
Headers, links, anchors?

Possibilities: all level of headings

Question: What priority should this feature receive?  Probably should 
be level 2.


DP: One thing that is missing is the ability to read headers only.
JA: DOM might be able to take care of this

IAN: Before and after content is in CSS 2  - would allow cues to be 
added before and after any element

This topic needs more discussion.  
Need to balance the "ideal" with reality in terms of how people 
develop pages.

Direct Navigation

Priority 1: Keyboard commands to move focus directly to links and 
controls on a page. 

Need to clarify this issue. Some browsers do present users with a list 
of link. However getting easy access to these links is important. Need 
something to get directly to the link you need. 

Possible: search by position eg. Numbered links, search by name 
of links might be useful, using some type of keyboard commands, 

What about form controls?

What about "search attribute value"?  eg. Find  anchors with name 
"xxx"  Example: modified FIND command to search "link names" . Is 
that too much work for the user?

Can you have more intelligent matching?

Priority 1: Keyboard commands to move focus directly to non-link 
and non-control elements in a document. 

Probably can be a priority 2

Example: whatever paragraph you moved to would be highlighted

Need to be able to get the focus on a page with keyboard commands 
so that the text can be copied and pasted.

New CSS feature psuedoclass can specify when rule that applies 
when the element has the focus, any element.

Presentation of item with focus -

 CSS2 will allow focused element to have specific characteristics - 
font, size etc - this should be given a high priority. 

Priority 1: Keyboard commands to move focus to cells in a table.


Read a column, read a cell, jump to specific cells

Have to browser to expose cell information, AT - screen reader needs
Need distinction between self-voicing browser and browser with 
screen reader

What if we had a mode so when you hit table - only the cell contents 
appeared on the screen

Consensus - we do need to have something with regard to navigating 
in table cells.
We need to consider how our navigation schemes work in both kinds 
of tables - data tables - versus presentation tables because there are so 
many legacy tables


Other issues: XML versus CSS2,

Received on Tuesday, 12 May 1998 15:25:17 UTC