RE: ACCESSKEY attribute

1) Accesskey and OS
I agree there should be a W3C convention for selecting an Accesskey so that
the underlining operating system can handle it appropriately. Maybe we
should offer two ways to designate accesskey (this is the royal we since I
am not on the WAI). The first as is - so it is up to the author to handle
the look and feel (especially important for things like graphic buttons).
The second by having an Accesskey tag. For example:

<akey>S</akey>ave would embellish 'S' and set up the accesskey according to
the specifications of the OS. 

2) Your Web site:

This is what you had (a label is not selectable and the focus will not move
there):
<p><label accesskey=U>URL: <input type=text name=url value="http://"
size=45></label></p>

This works (the accesskey is placed in a selectable element):
<p><label>URL: <input type=text name=url value="http://" size=45
accesskey=U></label></p>

David.
-----Original Message-----
From: Liam Quinn [mailto:liam@htmlhelp.com]
Sent: Monday, February 16, 1998 4:50 PM
To: David Bolnick; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: ACCESSKEY attribute


At 11:43 AM 16/02/98 -0800, David Bolnick wrote:
>In IE the ACCESSKEY is assigned to the Alt so that is follows the
>Alt+menu-mnemonic convension (as in selecting a menu from the menu bar).

Is there any reason why ACCESSKEY does not work for me using IE 4.01 for
Win95 at <http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/csscheck/>?

>Given that: If, for example, a 'Save' Button uses ACCESSKEY="s", then the
>button text should be _S_ave (i.e., Save with the initial S underlined:
><u>S</u>ave).

The browser should underline the character, not the author.  If the author
underlined it, users of non-supporting browsers and browsers with a
different method of selecting an ACCESSKEY would be somewhat confused.
Also keep in mind that the U element is deprecated in HTML 4.0.

A more explicit implementation, and one that would allow for an access key
not actually present in the label, would be for the browser to output
[ALT-S] (for ACCESSKEY=S) before or after the form control.  The
my-layout-or-no-layout crowd would probably throw a fit, but it might be
useful at least as a user option.  In general, though, I'd rather as a user
have the convention of my operating system used--for Windows, this would be
underlining, but other operating systems may have different customs.

--
Liam Quinn
Web Design Group            Enhanced Designs, Web Site Development
http://www.htmlhelp.com/    http://enhanced-designs.com/

Received on Tuesday, 17 February 1998 02:25:42 UTC