Feel free to forward this message. My apologies for cross-postings.

This message is for people who are interested in driving PCs more
effectively by keyboard.

A huge barrier to efficient, intuitive, and easy keyboard access to Windows
for non-screen reader users relate to difficulties spotting the object that
has focus. In general, focus indicators in Windows are either inconspicuous
or too subtle. There are even situations when the focus indicator is
invisible; users can only determine the object with focus by deduction. (If
users have to think THAT hard to be able to operate software, usability is
broken.)

The issue of inconspicuous focus indicators has been known for at least
eight years. I doubt that I was the first to note it, but I did document the
problem in 1997 or 1998, and demonstrated it to several members of the
Microsoft accessibility group in March 1998. Over the years I have
facilitated workshops on keyboard-only access to Windows, and difficulties
spotting the focused object has been a frequent source of frustration among
workshop participants. When screen information cannot be perceived, the
ability to act on the information is impeded, or stops.

I do not know how or even whether the problem will be addressed in Windows
Vista, which is scheduled for release next year. However, there is a partial
solution available now, at least when browsing web content.

Aaron Leventhal, the IBM web accessibility architect, recently sent me
instructions for enhancing the default focus rings in Mozilla Firefox.
Although not a perfect solution, it works extremely well, and I am
suggesting that people try it. An unexpected yet entirely beneficial
side-effect is that mouse users will have an easier time knowing whether
they can enter text in a field without clicking into it, and whether they
have successfully clicked or right-clicked on an object. Try it on
www.google.com, and you will see what I mean.

The solution beautifully illustrates that it is not only possible to design
software that is as easy to drive by keyboard as by pointing and clicking,
but that the result is more flexible, versatile, and easier-to-use software.
The developers of Firefox appear to understand this more clearly than
developers of most mainstream applications. Let us hope that this kind of
perceptiveness becomes more widespread.

Here are the steps to create more conspicuous focus indicators for Mozilla
Firefox. The basic technique is to select some text in this message, copy
it, and paste the text into a specific file in a Firefox subfolder:

1) Exit Firefox.

2) Find the “chrome” subdirectory for your Firefox settings.

3) Look for a file called userContent.css or userContent-example.css. If it
is userContent-example.css, copy it to userContent.css

4) Open userContent.css in a text editor (e.g., WordPad or Notepad), and
paste in the following 12 lines of text:

*:focus { outline: 3px solid #10bae0 /* #10d0f0 */; outline-offset: 1px;
outline-radius: 5px; }
button:focus::-moz-focus-inner { border-color: transparent; }
button::-moz-focus-inner,
 input[type="reset"]::-moz-focus-inner,
 input[type="button"]::-moz-focus-inner,
 input[type="submit"]::-moz-focus-inner,
 input[type="file"] > input[type="button"]::-moz-focus-inner {
 border: 1px dotted transparent;
}
textarea:focus, button:focus, select:focus, input:focus {
outline-offset: -1px; }
input[type="radio"]:focus {outline-radius: 12px; outline-offset: 0px; }
a:focus { outline-offset: 0px; outline: }



5) Save the file.

6) Launch Firefox and observe how focus is much easier to see, at least in
content.


Alan

Alan Cantor
Cantor Access Inc.
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www.cantoraccess.com

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