Guideline 2.1: Keyboard Accessible - Make all functionality available from a keyboard.
Success Criterion 2.1.1: Keyboard - All functionality of the content is operable through a keyboard interface without requiring specific timings for individual keystrokes.
Guideline 2.4: Navigable - Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are.
This guide will focus on the navigational aspects of creating a LibGuide. Much of this process is determined primarily by LibGuide itself and either cannot or should not be modified (?without contemplation?), such as the order of focus when using the Tab key to move through a page. However, there are certain elements you can and should include when creating your LibGuide.
Not everyone can use a mouse or trackpad, nor does everyone choose to use a mouse or trackpad. Some people may rely fully on keyboard functions to navigate a site. Others may use on-screen keyboards or switch devices to navigate. Because of this, accessible websites must include alternate navigation options that use proper content markup. We will break this guide into two sections:
Most of the accessibility guidelines covered in this tab will be fulfilled on the backend by a website or content manager; however, there are a few areas that will be organized and developed by the content owner. These areas are specific to the layout options that are coded into the content's outline and are controlled by fairly simple markup features, which will be discussed in the Content Markup tab.
As you move throughout the Navigation tab, think about this information provided by WCAG:
Sighted users perceive structure and relationships through various visual cues — headings are often in a larger, bold font separated from paragraphs by blank lines; list items are preceded by a bullet and perhaps indented; paragraphs are separated by a blank line; items that share a common characteristic are organized into tabular rows and columns; form fields may be positioned as groups that share text labels; a different background color may be used to indicate that several items are related to each other; words that have special status are indicated by changing the font family and /or bolding, italicizing, or underlining them; items that share a common characteristic are organized into a table where the relationship of cells sharing the same row or column and the relationship of each cell to its row and/or column header are necessary for understanding; and so on.
When such relationships are perceivable to one set of users, those relationships can be made to be perceivable to all.
Having these structures and these relationships programmatically determined or available in text ensures that information important for comprehension will be perceivable to all. [2]