[css3-flexbox] ordering and accessibility concerns from fantasai on 2012-07-02 (www-style@w3.org from July 2012) (original) (raw)

On 06/20/2012 03:26 PM, fantasai wrote:

I'm going to walk us through some a11y-related questions. :)

Flexbox allows page content to be reordered. Two questions arising from this are then: A. Should tab-order be affected? B. Should speech order be affected?

I'm putting both in the same thread because we have this consistency question:

• Should tab-order be consistent with speech order or visual order, if they are different?

Flexbox allows content reordering in two ways:

1. 'flex-direction: row | row-reverse | column | column-reverse ', which can effectively reverse the order of items
2. 'order: ', which can arbitrarily reorder flex items

Proposal:

• Neither 'order' nor reversing affects rendering in non-visual media. This keeps them consistent with non-CSS UAs, and allows the author to perform visual reordering without affecting non-visual displays, which will use the source document's linear (and ideally logical) order. Best practice for accessibility will continue to be that the source order is logical; 'order' and reversing allow the source order to remain logical while the author manipulates the visual order.

• The 'tab-order' is also not affected by either 'order' or reversing. However, in the future, the CSSWG may introduce a way to have tab order follow the visual order instead of the logical one.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 2 July 2012 18:49:18 UTC