Comments on: Context hover – accessibility

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:14:32 +0000

Just in addition to that, it would be very easy to plug the holes in this that have been pointed out using jquery’s event triggers.

Building on your second example, you simply fire the .blur() event on the focused anchor at the end of the mouseout function eg:

function() { $("a[href="+$(this).attr("href")+"]").removeClass("hover"); $(this).blur(); }

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:47:14 +0000

Oi, you are right, K – sometimes we can go too far. Agreed that your second example within this article is better than the first example. However, browsing the web, sometimes even as a mouse user I start to click on link, think better of it, and move my mouse away and release the button. The a has acquired focus in this step.

Since it has focus, in the example, the remainder of links are underlined, and the focused link is marked as well. Then, as I go to hover, even more fluttering is happening across the page to result with a visual smattering of information. Convulsions follow.

I agree with you: the original hover only implementation is the best.

By: Alma

Alma — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:54:52 +0000

Hello, first of all thanks for noting my article. I must disagree with you about the benefits of something like your script for keyboard navigating users.

If I have a navigation link named “portfolio” and in some other place of the page I have another link pointing there but with another anchor, some users might not understand they both lead to the same place thus making them tab back to the nav link. Is the same issue as in mobile browsing, the visual cue makes users realize they don’t need to go up and down through the page (which is a real pain if you must do it with your keyboard, one step at a time and in the order the coder thought was better).

Please remember, not all the people who browse with a keyboard is disabled so it’s not about accesibility this time.