RE: closing a Tab?

I have a few observations and thoughts for consideration: 
1. When I navigate to a tab, it will be great if my screen reader is able to
announce the tab name and a suffixx  like : Tab 1 of 3, or Selected - Tab 2
of 3, etc. Can this be exposed via state and role properties?
2. Why cannot  hitting Enter on a tab toggle it on/off? If it is active the
tab will convey that it is selected (based on above thought) and the
contents of the tab will be displayed. (The start of tab content will
hopefully be marked up as h2 or something). Hitting Enter on the tab again
will deselect it and the contents of the tab will not be displayed and not
be exposed to AT.    
3. Screen readers today announce how many UI elements (links and forms) are
present on a page via a hotkey for page summary. So users may be unaware of
tabs and such UI elements that are not coded as links or controls. These
cannot be navigated to and operated using traditional Web page access
methods. If one is aware of their presence,   users can then use Control+tab
or arrow keys or turn off virtual cursor mode etc in order to access these
items. So screen readers will need to include these UI elements in the page
summary info. 
Sorry If I have digressed a bit.
Thanks,
Sailesh Panchang
Accessibility Services Manager (Web and Software)
Deque Systems Inc. (www.deque.com)
11130 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite #140,
Reston VA 20191
Phone: 703-225-0380 (ext 105)
E-mail: sailesh.panchang@deque.com

-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of Becky Gibson
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 3:35 PM
To: wai-xtech@w3.org
Subject: Re: closing a Tab?


I implemented a context menu for closable tabs in the dojo tab container. 
See the second tab panel example on [1]. The tabs with title "first" and 
"third" are closable. Pressing shift-F10 with focus on these tabs will 
bring up a context menu with "close".  If a tab is closable, pressing the 
delete key with focus on the title will delete the tab.  I thought this is 
what the style guide group had decided upon?  Although it would be nice if 
there was a way to indicate to the screen reader user that a tab (or any 
other item) was deletable without having the use the shift-F10 discovery 
mechanism. 

I based my implementation decision on the  DHTML Style Guide June 29, 2007 
meeting minutes [2]: 
TW: options other than DELETE - CTRL+F4 a possibility, have
to get comments on that - what we are saying is context menu and keyboard 
shortcut combo fine - great if had property so didn't have to use context 
menu, but maybe that's phase 2
So perhaps we made a decision but just didn't record it in the style 
guide?
[1] 
http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/tests/layout/test_T
abContainer.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007Jun/0130.html

Becky Gibson
Web Accessibility Architect
                                                       
IBM Emerging Internet Technologies
5 Technology Park Drive
Westford, MA 01886
Voice: 978 399-6101; t/l 333-6101
Email: gibsonb@us.ibm.com
blog: WebA11y

Received on Thursday, 6 March 2008 15:27:31 UTC