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One primary requirement lacking in jQuery (and in most DHTML toolkits in general) at the moment is robust support for keyboard accessibility. To this end, Fluid is developing a couple of jQuery plugins that will make it significantly easier to create DHTML interfaces that support familiar idioms for navigating with the keyboard.
The Plugins
jQuery.tabIndex
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- Provides cross-browser support and normalization for getting, setting, and evaluating the presence of the "tabindex" attribute.
- More information about browser incompatibilities can be found in Simon Bates' recent Fluid blog post
download jQuery.tabIndex plugin
TabIndex API
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jQuery().tabindex() |
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Returns true if the element has a tabindex attribute, and returns false if tabindex is not set. Neither Simon or I have yet to come up with a reliable method for querying tabindex attributes on versions of IE < 6, so this method will always return false on IE 5.5 and below.
jQuery.keyboard-a11y
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- Makes it easier inject keyboard accessibility into your DHTML interfaces, without having to write onerous hand-rolled code for managing focus and tabbing behaviour.
- Still in development.
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This library provides DHTML keyboard accessibility without requiring you to implement a whole model for widgets. While it doesn't solve all your accessibility needs, it's designed to work with lots of different types of markup and be consistent with the jQuery approach. Here's a quick summary of the API:
Keyboard A11y API
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jQuery().tabbable() |
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