A11Y: ARIA announcements should be used when navigating the topic list with keyboard shortcuts

UX
1

Hi all,

This is a rather minor accessibility bug, but would be an incredibly cool feature. I (just) learned that it’s possible to navigate the topic list via K and J, and you can open a topic with O. And it almost works, but NVDA doesn’t announce what topic you’re focused on when doing this. It would be cool if an ARIA announcement was used to only announce the topic title and author when you navigate topics, or even better, it could be a language string you can set in site texts. This would make topic navigation insanely easy and smooth.

5 Likes
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Great idea, I think this would be possible without too much complication — this would be similar to navigating via heading as suggested in the earlier topic you started, right? (A11Y: topic lists do not have headings for each topic)

3 Likes
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Yup, it’d be similar. Right now NVDA just says “Row 1”, “Row 2”, etc., but this would complete that. It’s up to you guys whether both are an option that one could disable or not, but I don’t think this should be toggleable, unlike the heading thing which does make a bit more sense if it harms the visual appearance of the site.

2 Likes
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Any updates on this? If this will take a while that’s alright, just thought I’d check in.

1 Like
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Not yet, but ideally next week!

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so while looking into this, I notice that NVDA doesn’t let me use the K and J navigation… I know there’s a way to “pass the key through” with NVDA+f2… but this has to be pressed every time, are you using some other mode or shortcut to use it that I might be missing?

7

Hi there,
You can use NVDA+Space to enter and exit focus mode. Then you can press J and K and shift-J/K and such without NVDA+F2.