Overview
Fluid is increasingly using the jQuery JavaScript toolkit for low-level DOM manipulation, event binding, and utilities. jQuery's simplicity and elegance provide a firm foundation upon which to build the Fluid component framework.
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 jQuery plugin that will make it significantly easier to create DHTML interfaces that support familiar idioms for navigating with the keyboard.
The Plugin
jQuery.keyboard-a11y
- Makes it easier inject keyboard accessibility into your DHTML interfaces, without having to write onerous hand-rolled code for managing focus and tabbing behaviour.
- Provides cross-browser support and normalization for getting, setting, and evaluating the presence of the "tabindex" attribute.
- Still in development.
- More information about browser incompatibilities can be found in Simon Bates' recent Fluid blog post
This plugin makes it easy for developers to add keyboard handlers to their code without a lot of extra overhead. A common problem in the DHTML world is that user interfaces are built to work solely with the mouse, excluding users who need to use the keyboard to navigate. jquery.tabindex will take the hard work out of making your interfaces usable with the tab and arrow keys.
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
The API can be found on the Keyboard Accessibility Plugin API page.