malsup/cycle2 — pull request #508 by baloneysandwiches (2014-04-30 00:10:32+00:00)
Title: Use <button> for keyboard accessibility

Great to have gotten away from for the pager markup.
That's an accessibility anti-pattern. Anchor hrefs should only point to
external content, not a dummy placeholder.

But elements that have a more-or-less fixed role in loading in-page
content should really just be s. This allows them to default to
conventional CSS focus outlines, and to be sequenced normally in the
tabindex for keyboard-only, non-mouse users. Buttons have much better
out-of-the-box accessibility for elements without ARIA roles:

http://yahoodevelopers.tumblr.com/post/59489724815/easy-fixes-to-common-
accessibility-problems

Also on a humourous, ranty note:

http://www.karlgroves.com/2013/05/14/links-are-not-buttons-neither-are-d
ivs-and-spans/

If you want to preserve the "bullet" look for the demos, you could maybe just make the buttons circular using CSS, and put some semantic visually hidden markup. {{slide#}}

P.S: I smiled to discover that Builtwith says that cycle (1 & 2 combined) is used on more than 3 million sites. More than Modernizr! Wow, congrats!