- From: John Foliot - WATS.ca <foliot@wats.ca>
- Date: Mon, 2 Jan 2006 13:18:02 -0500
- To: "'Charles McCathieNevile'" <chaals@opera.com>, <wai-xtech@w3.org>
- Cc: <jongund@uiuc.edu>
Charles McCathieNevile wrote: > On Mon, 02 Jan 2006 18:08:26 +0100, Jon Gunderson <jongund@uiuc.edu> > wrote: > >> I think the author should have a convienent way of defining elements >> they want to have keyboard shortcuts. Obviously users should be able >> to change or ignore these author requests. But is does give the >> author an ability to say this is a fequently used or consistent >> feature within their website. > > Yep. I think that is generally recognised as the really useful and > important part of accesskey. As currentlly specified I think the rest > is broken, the question is how to fix it... Hang on! Question: are we talking about the existing, broken accesskey attribute of HTML/XHTML, or the newly proposed ACCESS element and @role, @key attributes of the Draft XHTML 2? If it is the former, then it is seemingly the responsibility of the user agents to allow users to modify, over-ride or otherwise ignore author declared accesskeys - something that Chaals acknowledges is currently broken. Gez Lemon of Juicy Studios (with encouragements and support from some members of GAWDS) has concocted some nifty server scripts (both PHP and ASP) that bind the intent but leave the mapping to the end user. These scripts work in the here-and-now with the flawed accesskey attribute, but require specific end user intervention. See: User-Defined Access Keys (PHP Version): http://juicystudio.com/article/user-defined-accesskeys.php User-Defined Access Keys (ASP Version): http://juicystudio.com/article/user-defined-access-keys-aspversion.php ************* If it is the later, then the author supplied method of proposing the intent is via <ACCESS> and @role - again, these *should* be enough for the author to declare intent; the final rendering should be handed off to the end user, and their respective user agent(s) and system configuration. Author proposes intent (Jon's "...frequently used or consistent feature within their website..."), end user configures. Why muddy the issue with a key proposal? Jon, if you have not already looked at the proposed collection of common @roles, might I suggest you take a peek: http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/mod-role.html#col_Role These *should* cover off most author's requirements "out-of-the-box", and, given their consistency and standardization from W3C, would most likely come hard-wired to different user-agents anyway, but not necessarily the same alph/numeric accelerators in each configuration - I have referenced previously the similar differences in IE's Favorites (ALT + A on Windows OS) versus Firefox's Bookmarks (ALT + B) - identical functionality, but different end-user keys. JF -- John Foliot foliot@wats.ca Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca Web Accessibility Testing and Services http://www.wats.ca Phone: 1-613-482-7053
Received on Monday, 2 January 2006 18:18:11 UTC