Accessibility - Keyboard Focus order - tab directly to form or tab through all elements?

Question

Background info:

I'm performing an Accessibility Audit as per the new AODA law in Ontario:

http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/source/regs/english/2011/elaws_src_regs_r11191_e.htm#BK15

It follows the WCAG 2.0 guidelines for accessibility:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/Overview.php

Question:

For a website page with a Form, when the page first loads, should the tab order be:

1. Each content element such as logo, text, and images before reaching the form? It would reduce expediency but be more accessible to users with screen readers who can orient themselves to the page Or;

2. Directly to the form? Losing out on user orientation for expediency.

The guideline is here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/Overview.php#keyboard-operation

Basically, my gut says to set the focus directly to the form because a majority of users but I'm concerned it may not meet that guideline. Or am I not interpretting that rule properly?

Note: I'm not an accessibility specialist but was asked to do this audit and this is what has come up. Really curious about how you guys approach this guideline.

Answer 1

Don't take them straight to the form, users won't be expecting that.

A decent accessible website will have skip links at the top that the user can select to jump straight to the content of the page anyway. And if not it should have proper headers in there too so they can jump straight to the H1 by pressing H (or similar key, depending on the screen reader being used anyway).

Don't forget, you should be able to browse a site with a screen reader and your monitor turned off and have it all make sense to you. Potentially you wouldn't know that the page you've landed on is mostly a form unless you can see it, but blind users don't have that luxury.

Screen reader users are pretty adept at browsing around a site very quickly. If the site is built with decent markup then they can get the hang of the site pretty quickly, so introducing 'helpful' tab orders like you suggest may likely be a hindrance than a help as it breaks the convention of how the rest of the site works. (For instance after first orienting themselves with what the items are in the main menu they may decide to start browsing by hitting 1 to take them to the first H1, or H to take them to the first header, or tab x 3 to cycle through the various skip links to 'jump to content' and hit enter through near-reflex as that's what they've done for the other 5 pages on the site.

Also, what if a page has several forms? Where would you position the cursor then? Or if there's a search field in there (which is also a form)?

So yeah, you should ensure the site is consistent and screen reader users will navigate it plenty fast enough.