Thank you for sharing this plugin. I have a website (http://www.ict4vip.nl) for people with visual impairments who use screenreading software. By using your plugin, I can now use the default WordPress theme and sub menus.

It would be nice as this technology is included by default in WordPress.

Sincerely,
Ton van Leest

Instead of closing the lightbox when an “outside” link is focused, what about automatically focusing the last or first focusable item (or lightbox container)?

I feel that because the user did not directly close the lightbox, it should not be closed for them. A possible solution is to add an empty focusable item at the top and bottom of the BODY and when they are focused, throw focus to lightbox. This of course solves the problem if a user goes to the browser chrome and then tries to TAB back into the page. This does not solve the problem if a user focuses a link within the page which can be done with screen readers by pulling up a list of controls and then instructing the screen reader to move to any of them. You could add listeners to each of these “outside” conrtrols and once again throw focus to the lightbox, but this could be a bit too involved for some pages.

Another problem I find with lighboxes and this pertains to mostly screen reader users, is that it can be unclear when the lightbox starts and stops when arrowning throw the lighbox content. A possible solutions is to add off-screen text to the start and end of the lightbox that would read somthing like:

Dialog Start

(content)

Dialog End

or whatever you feel appropriate.

Thoughts on user experience?

Touch devices more often than not don’t have a keyboard or a mouse. Title attributes aren’t visible either.

Add to that the smaller viewport size – numerous lightboxes i’ve seen are bigger than the width (or hight) of common handheld viewports.

Responsive web design further complicates the situation – any lightbox would need to retain its accessability throughout the various design breakpoints.