[Accessibility-testing] A question about keyboard hyperlink controls

[Furkle Industries]

Given that it's about Animalia, which was the one I was assuming it was
about, it does ring a "this seems related to something I've seen." I would
be posting it directly to the thread but intfiction's mailserver has a
habit of taking literal hours to send password reset e-mails and I haven't
logged on to that site in at least a couple years. What I can say, and will
relay to IMW when I have the chance, is that I've been using tab navigation
with Animalia and it fails in a way I haven't really seen Twines fail
before. Usually once, near passage load time (or near the time when you
load in a new fragment of text), the tab will execute successfully, but
then be cleared entirely from the screen. I suspect this is some sort of
logic/re-rendering on Harlowe's side that causes the element that is
currently in focus to be removed, then readded, but I'd need to spend a bit
of time reading the source code to figure out for sure. Unfortunately my
instinct here is that whatever he's doing, he probably did it across the
whole of the story, so it's probably unlikely that it'll get fixed anytime
soon.

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 10:00 PM Jason McIntosh <jmac at jmac.org> wrote:

> My questions about Twine earlier this evening reminded me of this forum
> post from a screen-reader-using IF fan struggling with some recent Twine
> games: https://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=26845
>
> The key part of her complaint seems to be this:
>
> > I can generally access most Twine games but there are a few games which
> I am struggling with because of the way the links are handled. In some of
> the Twine games the clickable text is easily identified, it's either
> presented as separate options at the bottom of the page or stands out as an
> individual indented line within a body of text, making it clear where you
> need to click. Unfortunately, there are a few games where the word you have
> to click is not identified in any meaningful way, I'm sure it is
> highlighted in some way if you can see the screen but I can't see a way of
> getting the screen-reader to pick it out. Sometimes clicking randomly on
> words has got me through but this can be annoying and time-consuming when
> trying to make your way through a long game with extended bodies of text.
>
> Does this ring an “Oh yes, I know exactly what she means” bell for anyone?
> I admit that it runs against my expectations for how keyboard control would
> work; I would expect that the browser doesn’t care whether a hyperlink is
> all by itself or in the middle of a paragraph, you should still be able to
> select it through keyboard controls. Is this sometimes not the case?
>
>
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