Why can't I tab through this site?

[David Gillaspey]

A well-designed website should permit the user to tab through all the links; this is important for accessibility purposes. Because my own site features a simple design -- no fancy DHTML drop-down menus, etc. -- I assumed users could tab through the whole site without a problem. This morning I discovered I was wrong -- the tabbing on my site doesn't work at all. Ouch!

[Note: I have since fixed the problem, but I'm still wondering why the tabbing didn't work before. See my post below.]

I use PHP, lots of include files, and a mySQL backend database. Anyone know if there's something fundamental to these technologies or techniques that prevents users from tabbing through a site?

Thanks in advance.

David Gillaspey
Great Church Websites

[mrbelfry]

I can tab through your site fine (I use win2000 and IE6). I can think of no reason why php or mysql should mess with your tabbing at all.

Surly tabbing is a feature of HTML and your browser; as long as php and mysql deliver standard html it shouldn't alter the tabbing.

Yours clueless

MrB

[David Gillaspey]

Hi MrB,

Actually, I've spent the past three days adding the "tabindex" attribute to every anchor and form tag on my site to ensure tabbing works on my website. (Glad to know it does work, though I carefully tested my work as I did it.) I mentioned the fact that I was doing this on my home page during this time, but deleted the comment yesterday when I had completed it, so you would not have seen the comment. But I should have made mention in my original post that I knew how to fix the problem, and was in fact fixing the problem. For that, I apologize.

Tabbing does work now throughout my website, as you say. Folks will have to take my word for it that before, however, tabbing did not work. (Which is why I was mystified.) There's still one glitch: Once a user has tabbed all the way through a page, after the last tab stop, the page loses "focus" (technical GUI term, there), and the user can't tab anymore. I'd like for the tabbing to start all over from the top left. Anyone know the solution?

Anyway, for those who are interested, I'll be writing about my efforts to ensure that tabbing on this site works (including on the dynamically generated search results pages -- that's a real trick!). This will be posted on the "Accessibility => Motion-impaired users" page in a few hours. See link at top left.

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[crowsfan85]

I don't think there are any errors with your tabbing.

Most sites lose focus at the end, because the focus goes to the address bar and then any search bars that are in your browser. After that it should start over from the top, at least it does for me in IE and Firefox.

And the only time you should need to set tabindexes are when the design elements on the screen don't follow the flow of the html. For instance, because I use CSS to absolutely position the 3 columns on www.therocksandiego.org and because the middle column comes first in the html code, it is the first column to receive focus when a user begins tabbing.

I could, if I so choose, add tabindex to the links to reorder them appropriately the correct way. But I wouldn't worry about it that much. Mostly, tabindexes are used to help users fill out web forms.

[David Gillaspey]

<< And the only time you should need to set tabindexes are when the design elements on the screen don't follow the flow of the html. >>

Consider the needs of motion-impaired people.

Motion-impaired people can't use a mouse, or they have difficulty doing so because of the relative precision of movement required by a mouse. These people include quadriplegics; stroke victims; people with diseases such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), muscular dystrophy or Parkinson's Disease; people missing limbs because of amputation, or from birth; people confined to bed; people that have problems with hand-eye coordination; aged people with trembling hands; etc.

Any one of us might find ourselves temporarily unable to use a mouse during a season of our life, too. You may injure an arm and have to wear a cast, or you may suffer temporarily from carpal tunnel syndrome and find that using a mouse is painful.

Blind people can use a mouse, but of course don't know where to point it. So ensuring that a webpage can be tabbed through is also important to them (although the web designer also needs to add labels to links).

I've added now (as promised above) a discussion about how to ensure a website can be tabbed through to this page on my site: <a href = "http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/accessibility_motion.php" target = "_blank">www.greatchurchwebsites.org/accessibility_motion.php</a>.

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[crowsfan85]

Oh, yes, I definitely agree for the accessibility reasons. And I would definitely recommend putting the main links first in your code, because those are most users tend to use the most, disabled or not. However, I'm still perplexed by the tabbing problems you were having, because you shouldn't need to explicitly set the tabindex for the links and fields on the page unless they're out of order in the code.

Keep in mind too that the higher you can push up the main content of your site, the better. Because search engines will tend to give a higher ranking to the content that is closest to the top. This is another great reason to use CSS, because you don't clutter up your html code with redundant html tags that take importance away from the elements that are actually important.

[David Gillaspey]

&lt;&lt; I'm still perplexed by the tabbing problems you were having, because you shouldn't need to explicitly set the tabindex for the links and fields on the page unless they're out of order in the code.
>>

Right, completely agree. Websites by default should generally tab through just fine. That's why I was shocked to discover tabbing didn't work at all (!) on my site before I made the fixes. Ouch.

But as I was going through the home pages in my virtual database, looking for examples about which to comment, I did come across some websites that had problems, even major problems, with tabbing. So I feel it's important to raise the issue, if only to get church webmasters to check their own sites. I didn't for the first eight months of my own site's existence, so I'm as guilty as anyone!

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites