Does anyone know if the aria authoring web page is keyboard accessible(https://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices-1.1/) ? Looking for keyboard interaction assistance to move focus between the left and right pane.
It'd be nice if browsers took advantage of landmarks so that keyboard users would benefit. Currently, only screen reader users benefit from them. Most applications on a PC allow the F6 key to navigate to different areas. Try it in Word, Excel, browsers, whatever desktop apps. It even sort of works on the authoring practice page, but not completely (at least not in firefox).
We had to implement our own landmarks dialog that we invoked with Ctrl+F6 (so it'd be similar to F6) and we'd query the page for landmark roles and display them in a dialog to allow you to quickly jump to a section of the page.
Skip links are about as close as you can get now, but even that wouldn't help on a page like the authoring practice. If I had tabbed through half the links in the left nav panel and then decided I wanted to move the main contents in the right panel, a skip link wouldn't help. I'd have to navigate back to the skip link in order to jump to the main section. It'd be nice to hit a key while I was in the middle of the left nav to jump me to the right side.
You could use the accesskey attribute to allow a shortkey to move between the two, but those are hard to discover. JAWS will tell you about the accesskey but NVDA and VoiceOver will not. If you don't have any indication on the screen that there's a shortcut/accesskey, then how will people know it's there. Once they know about it, it's great. For example, wikipedia has an accesskey='f' on the search field, but you might not know that. Once you do know it, it's great to be in the middle of a wiki article and hit alt+shift+f (on firefox and chrome) or alt+f (internet explorer) to quickly jump to the search field.
You could do the same with a left panel / right panel configuration if you had an accesskey on an object in the left panel and a different accesskey on an object in the right panel. Just make sure users know about it.