Re: [css-flexbox]

On 08/26/2015 01:51 AM, Bo J Campbell wrote:
>
> When Flexbox is used to display the new button order, the tab will
> jump in a non-linear fashion. WCAG does not specifically judge this
> as a violation, yet tabbing across buttons with the focus jumping
> back and forth is a very bad experience for any user, especially
> those with cognitive disabilities and/or using a keboard. One may
> suggest coding alternatives to any example, but a Flexbox attribute
> solves the issues for usability as well as accessibility no matter
> how creative a developer gets with it.

While it's true that the reordering in this case is not a WCAG
violation and the resulting tabbing behavior is a bad experience,
I don't think the solution here is to make the tab order match
the visual order through some special property. The solution is
to reorder the DOM instead of using the 'order' property.

Here's why: suppose we add this new property, tab-order, and the
author uses 'order' and 'tab-order' together. This fixes the
ordering sequence for visual users. But if someone is navigating
the page with speech, then the tabbing order and the speech order
are out of sync. Or if they are navigating the page with speech
and visual presentation together, the visual presentation and
the speech presentation are out of sync.

The 'order' property, like any CSS rearrangement technique, must
be used only when the visual order needs to be out-of-sync with
other modes of presentation, be they tabbing or speech or something
else. In all other cases, the author must reorder the DOM. Anything
else is a layering violation, and the result is various kinds of
breakage, as we can see from your example.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 31 August 2015 23:01:13 UTC