Re: Accesskey implementations...

Hi Charles,

So I really like the look of this!

When you say 'allow users to mark a site as 'don't bother'' have you 
thought about using IBM TRLs crowdsourcing social accessibility project 
technology -- to help or contribute to this?
http://sa.watson.ibm.com/

Now also have you thought about allowing an accesskey definition on the page to be a semantic keywork from an approved lexicon - such as 'save' or the like. You could then assign a key based on user preference for certain functionality?


Cheers
Si.

=======================

Simon Harper
University of Manchester (UK)

More: http://simon.harper.name/about/card/


On 01/12/2010 09:28, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> about a decade ago when I was actively involved here I used to waffle 
> on a lot about accesskey... In UAAG 1 there ended up some requirement 
> about how current interface bindings should be available to the 
> author, and configurable, which was a generalisation (probably to the 
> point of incomprehensibility) about how accesskeys *should* be handled.
>
> Recently I put this in to practice as an extension to Opera. In order 
> to see it working you need the Opera 11 beta, and then you can get it 
> from 
> https://addons.labs.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/excesskey/?display=en 
> - sorry screenreader folks, the documentation at 
> http://my.opera.com/chaals/excesskey is pretty accessible but the Beta 
> version of Opera is more or less unusable, especially the extension 
> stuff, with a screenreader ;(.
>
> It is a work in progress. But it clarified a bunch of things for me 
> (apart from the fact that I am not a brilliant developer and need to 
> do a whole lot more work ;) ).
>
> - accesskeys are really handy, if you know when they are there and 
> discover the sites that use them well (*to do: allow users to mark a 
> site as 'don't bother' so a different icon shows.)
> - It really matters whether you can choose the keys. I made a test 
> page that uses ł,आ,س,ф,± as accesskeys - all of which are things I 
> know how to generate and are from time to time reasonable keys to use. 
> (I also used ☆ and ✐ to see what happens ;) ). The common 
> english-language convention of using numbers is terrible for french 
> people who use the traditional 'azerty' layout, but it would make 
> perfect sense for them to use &é"'(§è!çà which are the natural 
> defaults for the same physical keys. Yet many french people use 
> english sites, and to some extent vice versa.
> - it makes perfect sense to allow accesskey='say this please', if you 
> shift the responsibility for assigning keys to the User Agent (which 
> you need to do in order to allow the user to decide what keys they 
> will use). Because I have already begun sketching out an architecture 
> that lets you assign non-keyboard interactions, and one obvious one is 
> voice where whole words or phrases are *better* than single letters.
> - if you can discover what accesskeys are there before you activate 
> them, it makes much more sense to have them directly activate a link 
> or control than just focus it, where that's a logical thing to do. Of 
> course it's not applicable to text input boxes :)
> - shift-esc is not a great activation shortcut for the accesskey menu. 
> I remap mine to '.' which is more convenient for me (sits between 
> search-in-page and search-for-links). YMMV.
>
> The basic idea is this:
> 1. There is a status indicator to tell you if there are accesskeys 
> defined in the page. This is an improvement on Opera's accesskey menu 
> (normally activated by shift-esc) which will list the accesskeys 
> defined, or tell you there are none. Which in turn is an improvement 
> on guessing what they might be or where they might be described.
>
> 2. The extension actually cleans up the accesskeys so they can be 
> fired - i.e. make sure that each is a single unique character (Opera 
> has a bug where accesskey="oops" will break the accesskey menu, and 
> while you can navigate the menu with the mouse it doesn't deal nicely 
> with two uses of the same key).
>
> 3. In the preferences (open extension manager, right click on the 
> funny cog wheel next to the 'uninstall button') you can select the 
> keys that you want to be used to assign accesskeys. For example, 
> numbers are not very helpful for users of french azerty keyboards, 
> since you need to use shift to produce them. And cyrillic is more 
> useful for many russian users since those are the letters they produce 
> by default. It has been tested with cyrillic, arabic, and various 
> other wierd characters.
>
> As the documentation explains, right now it uses Opera's native 
> accesskey menu, but for various reasons I am tempted to try and 
> replace that. But first I want to make some improvements in the 
> underlying code and capabilities - so it won't get any prettiness 
> enhancements for a while.
>
> cheers
>
> Chaals
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 December 2010 10:44:51 UTC