Accessible Spinners

[Colin Clark]

Hey Steve,

On 29-May-09, at 1:40 PM, Steven Githens wrote:
> Are there plans for an accessible spinner, or making the progress  
> component more generic to be used for events with an unknown time as  
> well?

No immediate plans, but it's something we can probably lend a hand with.

Just to be clear, when you say Spinner, you mean an indeterminate  
progress bar, not something like this, right?

http://yelotofu.com/labs/jquery/UI/spinner/spinner.html

Eli can comment on what he imagines it might take to make our Progress  
component support indeterminate spinning.

> In lieue of that, what is the best way to do a spinner at the  
> moment?  A custom jQuery UI dialog maybe?  Also thinking about if  
> you only want a portion of the page to be spinnered off (like you  
> may want the top menus to still work).


A dialog might be a bit annoying, just because it gets in the way and  
will have to be dismissed. Another option might be to find a spinning  
progress bar plugin for jQuery out there that you like. It should be  
pretty straightforward to add ARIA and keyboard navigation to it. In  
short, it should just be a matter of giving the widget an ARIA role of  
"progressbar," omitting the various value properties. Then put it in  
the tab order, and you should be good to go. If you find something, we  
can walk you through the process.

Let me know if that helps,

Colin

---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org