Keyboard accessibility presentation at Future of Web Design Tour 2009 in Glasgow

September 15, 2009 · by Patrick H. Lauke

On Monday, 14 September, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Glasgow leg of the Future of Web Design Tour 2009 on the topic of Keyboard accessibility - basic steps towards a more usable and accessible site.

The slides are available in OpenOffice (7.5MB) and PDF (9.85MB) format. Also, make sure to fact-check the results of my small experiment to find a better CSS outline suppression.

It was great to meet up with the local web design and development community, and I’m glad my presentation – and fellow Opera colleague Bruce Lawson’s reprise of his Future of HTML 5 overview – went down well.

Many thanks to the fine folks at Carsonified for the perfect venue and flawless organisation, and a special thanks to Andy Clarke and Paul Boag for agreeing to let their sites be ripped apart and used as examples.

Readers' comments 3

Left under the original article, as archived.

Charles SchlossWednesday, September 16, 2009 4:18:25 AM
Mağruf ÇolakoğluWednesday, September 16, 2009 6:18:11 AM
Nice presantation.Thanks.
Eddie LopezWednesday, September 16, 2009 1:36:19 PM
I konw this is about web design, but this got me thinking again about better keyboard access within the Opera GUI...

Namely, it would be nice to have the "alt-letter" access to your dialog widgets. We can tab through them and hit enter, but, it would be nice to just use the Windows "alt" functionality within the dialogs.

Demonstration: In Opera, open the preferences panel (alt-p) and then look at the "General" tab. The two buttons "use current" and "Details" are not accessible other than by tabbing.

Now look at the similar functionality in Firefox, (options, main) you'll see the three buttons "Use Current" "Use Bookmark" etc... all have indicators showing which button alt-letter combo to use.