Accessibility for keyboard only users

blindfish

The default pagination controls are rendered as clickable divs or spans; but these don't seem to be accessible to keyboard only users - i.e. if I tab through the page I jump from the search box straight past the table to the next link on the page; meaning there's no obvious way for me to see all data in very long multi-page tables (though I appreciate that the search tool might be the first port of call for such users). Could be that I've missed some additional keyboard controls; otherwise it might be good to make these controls keyboard accessible somehow.

Must confess I don't know what's considered the best practice solution: since the controls are added dynamically I would tend to insert [code]next page[/code] etc. then apply the desired behaviour on click and add preventDefault()...

allan

Hi blindfish,

With DataTables as it stands, what you could do is create a custom pagination plug-in which will create the 'A' tags for the pagination controls. However I realise that this is not exactly desirable... What I really want to do is to make DataTables fully accessible through the use of WAI-ARIA (in fact introducing ARIA this is about the only reason that there would be a 1.9.x version, while development is focused on 2.0). I've had trouble finding an ARIA consultant to help with this work on DataTables (since I'm no expert in the field and don't want to hamper accessibility when trying to make it more accessible!). If yourself, or anyone else reading this is an ARIA consultant or knowns someone who is, could you drop me a note in the forum here or through the contact form: http://datatables.net/contact .

Thanks,
Allan