On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, Michael Leibson wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance, but just how would a keyboard navigate hyperlink
> text, given that there are no menus, etc, to which to apply keyboard
> shortcuts?
I hope that answering this won't be considered as too off-topic. There's
at least a specific CSS technicality in my answer.
On a typical browser, you can use the Tab key to get to the next
"potentially active spot" on a page. Here "potentially active spot"
(my term) means basically a links or a form fields. (And you can use
Shift+Tab to move backwards.) This is common practice, and often
indispensable, to many people.
Using it causes the "potentially active spot" to be focused. This has
various impacts. On browsers that play by CSS 2.1 in this respect, the
element enters the :focus pseudo-class, and on IE, it enters the
:active pseudo-class. This in turn may change the visual appearance due to
a browser's default style sheet or just a browser's default way of
treating the situation. (The IE behaviour is only partly describable in
CSS terms, because it does not recognize the outline property but draws a
default outline.)
Here's one way of making an "active spot" easily noticeable to most users:
a:link:focus, a:link:focus *,
a:link:active, a:link:active *
{ background: yellow;
color: red;
text-decoration: none; }
a:visited:focus, a:visited:focus *,
a:visited:active, a:visited:active *
{ background: #ffc;
color: red;
text-decoration: none; }
Changing the background and the color actually looks more effective (and,
IMHO, more natural-looking) if there's that thin dotted outline that looks
like a border and appears there by default. (It's better than border since
turning it on does not require reformatting of the page.)
> As well, as I asked jens, wouldn't a colour-change on a:hover and/or
> a:active be just as effective?
It depends on how big the change is, on the colour vision (if any) of the
user, and on the properties of the display device. Changing both the
background and the content colour sufficiently tends to be rather
effective - to _most_ people. There's no particular reason, however, why
the _default_ "dotted border" (outline) would destroy the effect. Rather,
it helps it.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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