Keyboard-only navigation is provided for by Flex. No other work is required to get it to work, so there isn't much doc on it. The doc covers what you need to get screen readers to work as that is not built-in.
It is my understanding that we conform to accessibility guidelines, but that doesn't mean there aren't bugs. Most navigators switch "tabs" via arrow keys. Tabbing switches to the next focusable object, and Enter can activate a defaultButton. Using tab to switch between "tabs" is not an 80% case and, IMHO, would be unexpected by most keyboard navigation users. Buttons get highlighted as you tab to them to indicate that ENTER will activate them (assuming you've set a defaultButton somewhere). That's standard UI in Windows and Internet Explorer and probably other browsers and operating systems as well. If you think you've found problems with our accessibility support, including keyboard navigation issues, please file bugs and our accessibility experts will help the engineering team make the appropriate changes. ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Amy Sent: Sunday, May 25, 2008 12:49 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [flexcoders] Re: Button down event --- In [email protected] <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> , "Alex Harui" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Flex is pretty good, but not perfect. We design for 80% cases and do > not always handle the 20% case. We have code size and developer > resource restrictions. > > > > The 80% case is that some button should be activated on ENTER pretty > much no matter what control has focus. It would seem to me to be a poor > UI where ENTER could have more than one meaning. Once there is a > defaultButton, focusing any other Button enables ENTER handling on that > button. That's the way it seems to work on Windows as well. The > current button that will be activated on ENTER is given special > highlighting so it will hopefully be apparent to the user what ENTER > will do. > > > > I would recommend you choose one button that is the default for ENTER. Let's presume for the sake of argument that I have written something similar to a TabButtonBar, where I want to allow the user to tab through the buttons and press Enter to activate the highlighted button. What events would I want to listen for? If you're trying for accessibility, you need to be able to support keyboard-only navigation, as is hinted at in the Flex accessibility documentation. However, when you read the details of the accessibility documents, they talk about screen readers and ignore keyboard-only navigation. When you (not necessarily you personally, but the engineering team as a whole) were programming Flex so that buttons would be automatically highlighted when you tabbed to it, what were you intending that the significance of that visual cue was supposed to be? Thanks; Amy
