Re: Newbie question: Section 508 and "full keyboard access" on Mac OS X
Re: Newbie question: Section 508 and "full keyboard access" on Mac OS X
- Subject: Re: Newbie question: Section 508 and "full keyboard access" on Mac OS X
- From: Smith Kennedy <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2003 09:36:56 -0600
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your reply. I will elaborate inline, but I thought I would
summarize here. I did have "full keyboard access" turned on, and "For
windows and dialogs highlight...any control" selected. I believed that
setting would enable full tabbing access of all controls in a window,
but then experimentation didn't yield the results I expected.
For the sake of this discussion, let us assume that we are trying to
make a Mac OS 10.2 (Jaguar) system accessible to a user who is
completely blind. Also, I am dealing with both normal applications and
"Web applications" such as the embedded web server that is provided in
some of our printers.
Smith
On Monday, September 1, 2003, at 03:31 AM, Bill Cheeseman wrote:
on 03-09-01 1:04 AM, Smith Kennedy at email@hidden wrote:
However, Macintosh systems have traditionally only allowed tabbing to
move the user between certain types of controls. I believe they are
the text-related ones, such as text areas, text boxes, etc. Buttons,
pop-up menus, checkboxes and radio buttons have always been basically
inaccessible without a mouse. This seems to be true in normal apps as
well as in some Web browsers, including Safari. Lately, there have
been things that are supposed to allow "full keyboard access" to all
GUI controls, but I haven't found that it extends to all applications.
Perhaps only Cocoa apps inherited that capability automagically? It
is
not clear to me. But if that was all that Apple was relying on, that
would be incomplete.
You don't make it clear whether you have turned on Full Keyboard
Access on a
Mac and tried it out. From your comments about Safari, I gather that
you
have not. Under Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar," launch System Preferences,
open the
Keyboard preference pane, click the Full Keyboard Access tab, check the
"Turn on full keyboard access" checkbox, and click the "Any control"
radio
button.
Sorry - I should have mentioned this. I had this configured already,
exactly as you describe.
Or ask the vendor to do it for you when they set up your computer.
Then you will be able to tab among all controls on the screen, not
just text
boxes and lists, and use the arrow keys and the space bar to select
individual elements like tabs and radio buttons and menu items and
click on
selected controls.
That is what I would expect to happen when the above preferences are
set in "System Preferences->Keyboard". Unfortunately my own
experiences are not consistent with that (hence my posting).
Certainly all Cocoa applications implement these accessibility features
automatically, and most of Apple's applications these days are Cocoa
applications (whether written in Objective-C or Java, or another
language).
But a little testing shows me that it works on the Finder, too, which
is not
a Cocoa application. I'm quite confident that all Carbon applications
written using Apple's latest APIs are also fully accessible, because
Apple's
APIs do support accessibility. You can test other Apple applications
yourself easily on your own computer.
I have so far tested System Preferences, Safari, iTunes, iCal, Address
Book, Finder, and Mail, with good results except for Safari, as I
describe below. I need to remember that, if there are controls in a
window that aren't accessible, to look in the menus.
I'm surprised you single out Safari as not being accessible by
keyboard,
when in fact it is. It is a Cocoa application and the Cocoa APIs
supply this
capability automatically. I did notice with a quick look just now that
the
Reload and Add Bookmark buttons at the top of a Safari browser window
are
apparently not keyboard accessible even when enabled, which is a
glitch that
Apple should fix. However, both of those commands are also menu items
with
keyboard equivalents, and in addition the entire Safari menu bar and
all
menu items in Safari are accessible by keyboard, so the functionality
is
keyboard accessible. A couple of tests showed me that editable fields
on a
Web page, such as the Google search box, are also keyboard accessible.
The application itself seems to be fully keyboard accessible, but the
Web content is not.
The problem is that links and all form elements are not accessible via
the keyboard. The whole point of a Web browser is to present content
to the user, including pages with hyperlinks and forms in them. So
anything that is "clickable" needs to be accessible. If there is an
ordinary HTML page with one link on it, and a user can't navigate to
that link using the keyboard, how is a disabled user for whom a mouse
is irrelevant supposed to use the Web? If the user can't choose from a
pop-up menu or click on a button, that means the form will be useless
to them.
It is possible that this is a limitation of WebCore/WebKit/KHTML
instead of Safari specifically, but I haven't experimented with this to
know for sure.
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