I was wondering if the use of sliders would make it harder for people with disabilities to select values. How hard is it to drag and drop for them? How easy is it for them to see values changing while moving a different element, or to select a specific value?
Answer
Sliders are an enhancement--not a replacement for data entry. Anyone with motor skill difficulties may have trouble with sliders, so you want to ensure that the input values can also be manually entered via the keyboard. This requires that you make the value field visible and focus-able.
The markup should produce an input field by default:
Value:
[50% ]
Then via JS you'd 'enhance' this by adding the slider, which, in turn, would update the text field (and conversely, if you manually update the text field, it should update the slider).
Value:
>========||========< [50% ]
Note that HTML5 now includes the range input type which will render as a slider. I'm not entirely sure of the accessibility of that particular input at this time, however. I tried pulling up a reference for it, but I'm not finding any references to the range input that specifically address accessibility (if anyone has a link, please share!)
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