Hi everyone, Recently I've been working on a plugin for jQuery that will make adding keyboard accessibility to your user interfaces a lot easier. In the process of working on this, I ran into a number of inconsistencies in the way that browsers handle the tabindex attribute. Getting, setting, and checking for the presence of tabindex is a pretty common task for handling keyboard accessibility, so I decided to roll this into a little plugin for jQuery.
I've documented the plugin on my blog, but here's a quick summary of how to use it: jQuery().tabindex() // Returns the tabindex value of the first matched element, or undefined if no tabindex has been set. jQuery().tabindex(value) // Sets the tabindex value all matched elements. This will take either a String or a Number, but valid tabindex values should be -1, 0, or a positive integer. jQuery().removeTabindex() // Removes the tabindex attribute altogether from all matched elements. jQuery().hasTabindex() // Returns true if the first matched element has a tabindex value, false if not. More details available at: http://fluidproject.org/blog/2008/01/11/jquery-tabindex-plugin/ Hopefully you'll find this plugin useful. If so, I'd be happy to contribute it to the jQuery plugin repository. For the moment, you can get the plugin from the Fluid Project's SVN repository at: https://source.fluidproject.org/svn/sandbox/tabindex/trunk/jquery.tabindex.js As mentioned, I'm working on a larger plugin that helps add keyboard handlers for focusing and selecting items with the Tab key and arrow keys, making it easier to support common accessibility keystrokes in your UIs. It's still a work in progress, but please feel free to take a look and share your thoughts. My blog entry provides more details about the API and how to use it. There are a few bugs to fix, a few more methods to add, and I'll be moving all of the code out of the fluid.access namespace and making the low-level API private to the plugin. I'll send an announcement when it's closer to being ready, but let me know if you're interested in collaborating on it. https://source.fluidproject.org/svn/sandbox/tabindex/trunk/KeyboardHandlers.js https://source.fluidproject.org/svn/sandbox/tabindex/trunk/jquery.keyboard-a11y.js We've been using jQuery in the Fluid Project (http://fluidproject.org), and we've really been enjoying working with it. I'm looking forward to getting more involved in the community! Thanks, Colin --- Colin Clark Technical Lead, Fluid Project Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto http://fluidproject.org
