On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 05:43:20 +0200, Silvia Pfeiffer
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
I recently experimented with keyboard accessibility of media elements.
I found that browsers don't provide a default tabfocus on media
elements nor do they provide keyboard interactivity. I had to put
explicit @tabindex attributes onto the media elements to allow them to
at least receive focus. This is particularly irritating in a
screenreader.
As the video is specified right now, it is not a tabfocusable element
[1] and only interactive [2] when it has controls. This is sufficient
for audio elements, which have no visual representation without
controls, but isn't right for video, which always renders at least a
poster (or a black area). Also, if there are controls specified, they
should actually be tabfocusable.
They are in Opera. The spec allows it.
Even video without controls should allow keyboard focus and should
provide for default keyboard interaction: at minimum it should allow
for ENTER and/or SPACE to toggle play/pause - and clicking on it
should work, too.
Why? Video without controls is expected to have author-provided controls.
Trying to squeeze in hard-to-discover invisible browser-provided controls
in that case would likely just confuse users and make authors curse
browsers and try to preventDefault() and tabindex=-1 their video elements
(or switch back to Flash) so that their own controls is what their users
interact with.
Potentially it should have up/down arrows to change
the volume and left/right arrows to seek back/forward by e.g. 10sec.
As it's currently specified, browser cannot provide such interaction
when there are no controls, since the element is not generally
specified as an interactive element [2].
It can, actually. "interactive content" is just a category for the purpose
of the content model, it doesn't have implications like the above. (For
instance, if you have a <video> without controls attribute, and the user
enables the controls from the context menu, the element still isn't
"interactive content" but it shows controls.)
[1]
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/editing.html#focusable
[2]
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/elements.html#interactive-content-0
There is also a bug in the W3C wiki for this:
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17463
Cheers,
Silvia.
--
Simon Pieters
Opera Software
