WTH! (heck – for all you owners of 2 hockey sticks)
When did the UX, Dev, and QA teams stop giving a shizzle about tab order? Not just any tab order, but very specifically the tab order when it comes to drop down lists. Now as any good American I am partial to the drop down list due to the fact that it is another place where the USA imposes its COMPLETE DOMINANCE over *every* other country in the universe and upsets the balance of the western alphabet by putting U before A. But, I like it! It is convenient! I very much dislike to have to search through a bunch of countries I will never go (save conscription) to find the United States nestled between the UK and the US Minor Outlying Islands. I like it even better when they separate us with a line of dashes “- – - – - – - – -”, now that is a good use of dashes.
Given this affinity for the drop down list and the amount of e-shopping I do, I have recently noticed a pattern that slows me down and spins me out on a frequent basis. Drop downs are being ignored in tab order! They are just plain skipped over. Why is this and whose fault is it!
I was sure it was the fault of an often flawed development effort. Believe it or not, many sites on the web are developed “under the gun” and often lack specs and QA before release. QA comes in the form of customer QA which comes in the form of complains or declining visits. I digress.
Then as I started to write this post, I did some searching around on the web and found that it wasn’t the web that changed, it was my OS (— — — · · ·). My current gig has provided me with an 8 core bad ass Mac, a workstation that is at least 4x faster than the best of the famed G5 “super computer”. How could I refuse a run on LEOPARD 10.5! RAAAAAHHHHRRRRR… (ambiguously straight)
I found this – http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/11/how_to_enable_your_t.html
Basically it is Apple’s fault, or Mozilla, at any rate, it is not the fault of some high profile design and brand experience agency’s software development practices, or lack there of… They dodged a bullet again.
