taborder matters

[jadelennox]

At some point in the recent past, the LJ leave-a-comment interface has changed all of its tab orders. Possibly they follow some more logical workflow, but they now have absolutely nothing to do with the order of fields and buttons on the page's visual representation.

LJ's accessibility fail keeps getting worse and worse. I had gotten comfortable with the idea of no longer posting there, reading my list over there, or taking comments over there. But now it's a massive spoon-suck even to comment over there, and I feel like LJ has been steadily doing its best to cut me off from my friends who are still on LJ. I don't WANT to leave them behind. They are on a platform that makes most sense for them.

You know how, when something just takes too many spoons to figure out how to do, you are left flailing, not even knowing how to express your frustration? That's where I am right now.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Probably just after the crosspost stuff went in; I know that the checkboxes got moved out of the tab-order way of comment-post.

Even without the latest round of WTF-ery causing accessibility issues for me, right now the thing keeping me there is that I still have friends there who haven't moved. I don't want to leave my fish; I don't want to leave my oldest-and-best; I don't want to play with LJ anymore.

(and oh god how I wish I could say "email support, they'll take it to the devs" and feel confident that everybody will take it as seriously as it needs to be taken -- but just there are so, so very many things that have got to be screaming at them right now, and I fear it's been so much yelling for so long that it's all noise now.)

[dreamatdrew]

I fear it's been so much yelling for so long that it's all noise now
THIS!

[trialia]

This, all of it.

I haven't been getting comment notifications from LJ outside my own journal in months, and I've given up, they always blame it on me when it is not my fault.

[jadelennox]

see, I have friends there as well. And I want to keep interacting with them! But this accessibility fail is making it more difficult for me to stick around and keep hanging out with my friends, and that makes me really, really sad.

[musyc]

Bizarre. I just opened a comment box to test tabbing, and I go from subject-line-box, comment-textarea-box, "post comment" button, to ... the top of the page? Shift-tab gets me nowhere near the icon dropdown but someplace completely random? What in the hell. This is ungood.

[jadelennox]

Icon dropdown goes to PREVIEW. Bizarre.

[codeman38]

Wow. Even looking at the source code, the tab order makes no bleeding sense.

Given their last keyboard fail, I get the impression that nobody in power over there even uses a keyboard for navigation.

[jadelennox]

It's really nutty, innit?

[barakta]

As a very not very good dev doing things in tab order I know it's easy to cock it up, but it's also easy to fix and relatively easy to test. I should navigate more with a keyboard for dexterity impairment reasons and my boss is blind - I've learned SO much from him about keyboard nav in the last year and he's very helpful at double testing my work's "accessible" PDF forms... Cos tab order is the first thing Acrobat likes to shit on.

Sorry LJ are so faily they can't even add it to their list of things to fix, cos I'm sure there's someone who has 5 mins to twiddle the source code a bit.