Please test: WebHelp with keyboard control

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Tim Green
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Please test: WebHelp with keyboard control

Unread post by Tim Green »

I'm currently working on a major internal update for the Premium Pack skins with support for accessible keyboard control and standard semantic regions and roles. I'd be grateful if anyone familiar with the requirements for accessible keyboard control would visit this beta WebHelp site and provide feedback:

https://www.it-authoring.com/info/accessdemo/index.html

Important Notes:

Press F7 to turn on caret browsing in your browser:
Keyboard control doesn't work properly without this, so you do need to activate it.

About the keyboard shortcuts:
The keyboard shortcuts allow direct navigation between the major areas of the WebHelp. To use hold the Alt key down and then press the shortcut key. ALT+Q pops up the keyboard shortcuts menu, which can also be used for navigation. TAB and SHIFT+TAB rotate within the shortcuts menu until you press ESC to exit (once to return to the menu header, once more to close).

TAB navigation and menus:
Navigation is with the standard TAB and SHIFT+TAB keys. ENTER activates hyperlinks, menu entries, tabs etc. In menus like the hamburger menu, the ATOC menu and the shortcuts menu, TAB and SHIFT+TAB rotate within the menu until you press ESC to exit.

Special requirements for WebHelp:
WebHelp is different from standard web pages because it must provide access to a huge amount of data within a single page. The TOC, Index and Search panes are embedded pages, so you can't navigate between them with TAB. The keyboard shortcuts solve this problem. In addition to this, it was necessary to break a couple of the rules for accessible pages to a certain extent, and I'd like to know if the WebHelp is still navigable despite this:
  • There are two NAV regions instead of the standard one: The TOC pane and the topic header. This is because both these regions contain important navigation controls -- the TOC pane for the entire page and the topic header for the contents of the topic.
  • The semantic regions are not direct children of the <body> tag. There is one DIV container between them and the <body> tag. This is necessary if you want to be able to restrict the width of the page to be less than the window width. Many users asked for this and I don't want to disable it, so I'm hoping that current assistive aids will be able to handle it.
  • The NAV region of the topic is even further down in the page hierarchy than the other semantic regions. This is unavoidable because of the frameless design of the main page.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
User avatar
Tim Green
Site Admin
Posts: 23156
Joined: Mon Jun 24, 2002 9:11 am
Location: Bruehl, Germany
Contact:

Re: Please test: WebHelp with keyboard control

Unread post by Tim Green »

21 June Update:

The linked demo has been updated with the following improvements:
  • The popup guide is considerably more stable and robust. It is now keyboard only, because supporting mouse clicks would change modes in a way that could be confusing to non-sighted users. Clicks insed now just return to the guide title. Clicks outside close the guide. It can always be reopened with ALT+Q and closed with ESC.
  • The tab list for the TOC panel now has the correct semantic children and should be properly comprehensible for screen readers that can find it.
Here is the link again:

https://www.it-authoring.com/info/accessdemo/index.html

As always, we'd be very grateful for feedback, either directly here or at support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @).
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

Private support:
Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
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