Closed Bug 411913 Opened 16 years ago Closed 16 years ago

Accessible hierarchy should resemble spatial layout

Categories

(Core :: Disability Access APIs, defect)

x86
Linux
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: jdiggs, Assigned: aaronlev)

References

(Blocks 1 open bug, )

Details

(Keywords: access)

Examine the first section of the following page in Accerciser:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/3.0b3pre/whatsnew/ 

The following is the accessible hierarchy with the spatial order in parentheses:

I. Heading (Upper left)
        A. Link
II. List (Lower right)
        A. List Item (fifth item)
                1. About Link
        B. List Item (fourth item)
                2. Developers Link 
        C. List Item (third item)
                3. Store Link 
        D. List Item (second item)
                4. Support Link 
        E. List Item (first item)
                5. Products Link 
III. Form (Above the list)
        A. Section (The items in the form are in expected order. Yea!)
                1. Label
                2. Entry
                3. Push button

When attempting to present the current line to a user, it is helpful to have some way of knowing what text "comes text" without having to examine the extents of each accessible.
First, this would be nearly impossible to implement. Sorry, it would be a nightmare.

In any case, authors often want the screen reader or cell phone presentation order to be DOM order. For example, Opera Mini purposely does this using CSS positioning so that navigation links come at the end when browsing on a cell phone, even though visually they are at the top. I have seen websites for blindness organizations do the same thing.

I believe often users really just want to navigate in the natural order of the document, no matter how the author used CSS to affect layout.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 16 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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