Re: html 5 and accessibility issue

At 17:20 -0400 UTC, on 2007-07-02, Maurice Carey wrote:

>> (I have no idea how to do this with
>> a mac...and I've used one for 4 years) press the alt key and notice how the
>> main menu of your application gets activated

On Mac OS X the current default is Ctrl-F2. (Used to be Ctrl-m)

[...]

> I suggest to  make it mandatory that all user agents search through a page's
> source and gathers all <menu> items and anything with @accesskey and builds
> a native menu in the chrome of the user agent specifically for accessibility
> purposes.

I suggested something similar on the WHATWG mailing list, late 2005, in
"Menus, fallback,
 and backwards compatibility: ideas wanted". Starting at about
<http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2005-December/005240.html>.

It more or less ended up at the idea that, since rel is an attribute to <a>,
links in a navigation menu can have a rel attribute, and that UAs are
basically free to present such links in the chrome. I (sort of) implemented
this at <http://webrepair.org/>. Am still waiting for UA support...

(We also discussed the possibility of whether such a menu should be displayed
in the chrome *only* -removed from the body, where it would just be wasting
screen space- but [1] that's a presentational issue, so more in the realm of
CSS, [2] there's the problem what to do when only some of the links in a
navigation menu have a rel attribute, [3] in many cases it would be quite
difficult to remove something from the body without messing up the
presentation of the rest of the web page.)

> I'm quite sure it's easier for a user to navigate the common UI that all
> their OS's apps have in common than to try to navigate a web page.

Absolutely: <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/WWW/LINK/>

[...]

> ...actually I don't think this idea is crazy anymore...I think it's good.

It is, but it's not HTML's place to mandate UAs do this. If it should be
mandated at all, it's more something for UAAG.

Of course when the first UA that does this (well) hits the streets, others
will quickly follow. Safari on iPhone would be an obvious first candidate. It
would fit the UI-consistency that Apple understands, and on small screens
it'd be extra useful to find sites' navigation menus in the same place always.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 02:50:56 UTC