Re: Proposal for Keyboard Shortcuts for HTML5

Charles,

I am on the same page as you that people will want roles for a lot of
things and that is why we have namespaces in the XHTML ARIA specification.
For html 5 we will be forced to remove the extensibility and it is a shame.
Going forward we will have instances where people may create diagrams or
who knows what. We allowed for different taxonomies to be build to be able
discover and process them accessibly. Instead, we are forced to hardcode
the set we have already defined.

I agree the hint is great. We simply used alt. vs. label to do this.
However, there is something very subtly here that command does not address
that we do address with role (at least I don't see it). With role we would
allow cycling among elements with common roles. I don't see how we can do
that with label.

So, here is a use case:

Aria includes standard xhtml roles like main, secondary, and navigation. We
could modify the command element to cycle through all the secondary
landmarks (portlets) using the a key defined by the user agent or author. I
don't see that with a label.


Rich Schwerdtfeger
Distinguished Engineer, SWG Accessibility Architect/Strategist
Chair, IBM Accessibility Architecture Review  Board
blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/schwer



                                                                           
             "Charles                                                      
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             st@w3.org                 "Maciej Stachowiak"                 
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                                                                   Subject 
                                       Re: Proposal for Keyboard Shortcuts 
                                       for HTML5                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           





On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:24:19 +0200, Richard Schwerdtfeger
<schwer@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> Interesting. So there are few exceptions. I would like to see navigation

> by role like access (when this makes it in).
>
> You could place an optional key assignment here like access and eliminate
> accesskey altogether.

Doing this would only work if you really have roles for everything. Given
that the current move is away from having namespacing in the roles, based
on the assertion that implementors will actually hardcode things rather
than build an extensible mechnism, that might not be the obvious way to go

about it.

I agree that accesskey is inferior to most other ways of describing what
something does and letting the system give it the default shortcut. But I
am sure I can keep coming up with new things a widget will do faster than
you can standardise and get implemented every kind of role - so having
accesskey as a backstop that lets an author give a hint about what is
meaningful would actually be valuable (plus it reminds more authors to
think of keyboard access in the first place, with a bit of luck).

cheers

Chaals

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   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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