When you create a site you want it to be accessible as well as beautiful. We strive to give you both and this is why we have taken up a major campaign to improve the accessibility support of Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX controls .We, as developers, are quite used to getting things done through the keyboard and we want to give your users the same experience. This time the Dock and TagCloud controls are leveling up.
RadDock built-in commands’ default shortcuts
<
telerik:RadDock
ID
=
"RadDock2"
runat
=
"server"
AccessKey
=
"H"
>
<
Commands
>
<
telerik:DockCommand
Name
=
"customDockCommand"
Text
=
"Custom DockCommand"
OnClientCommand
=
"onCustomDockCommandHandler"
ShortCut
=
"Ctrl+Alt+E"
></
telerik:DockCommand
>
</
Commands
>
</
telerik:RadDock
>
Yes, it is that simple - just set the AccessKey property of the dock (to allow the users to focus the control) and the ShortCut property of the command and, voila, users can execute dock commands using just the keyboard.
This was not enough for us, so we went further and implemented ArrowKeys navigation.
Just like in RadDock, to enable keyboard navigation for RadTagCloud you need to set the AccessKey property of the control (or of a specific TagCloud item). If an access key shortcut combination is executed, the focus will be set to the first item in the TagCloud (or to the item that was previously focused). Then use the keyboard arrows to navigate around the tags (yeah!!!).
Since the TagCloud items are ordered in a list-like structure, using the left/right arrow keys feels natural. However what should we do with the up/down keys? Their nature imposes doing to the previous/next row, whereas the list structure has no concept of rows.
What we did is implement heuristics to enable row-like navigation among tag cloud items using the up/down arrow keys. This way the user can navigate through the items with better speed and flexibility.
This may seem like a small thing, but the work behind it is quite complex. Poke around the demos we have: Dock Keyboard Support and TagCloud Keyboard Support. Should you think there is something more we need to do on these two controls – drop us a line.
Marin Bratanov was a Principal Technical Support Engineer in the Blazor division.