RE: [DHTML Style Guide] Tablist: why alt+del?

Good points. ARIA will not go forward unless it is practical and works.
Talk to anyone in the industry who has tried to incorporate into a
mainstream product and you'll know what I mean.
Victor

-----Original Message-----
From: wai-xtech-request@w3.org [mailto:wai-xtech-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of James Craig
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 12:23 PM
To: Chris Blouch
Cc: David Bolter; Joseph Scheuhammer; wai-xtech@w3.org; earl johnson
Subject: Re: [DHTML Style Guide] Tablist: why alt+del?


Chris Blouch wrote:

> I spent quite a bit of time trying to implement keyboard shortcuts 
> that didn't interfere with either the OS, browser or AT and after 
> doing a lot of testing with XP, Jaws, IE and FF the available list was

> very very short. I believe one of the ideas going into the DHTML style

> guide was that ARIA would allow an AT to know that the user had focus 
> on a widget and get out of the way. Without that it would be nearly 
> impossible to find a set that works cross-AT, cross- browser and 
> cross-platform. Do Mac Voiceover users care that control- J jumps 
> cells with Jaws on Windows? Do Windows users care that voiceover users

> jump between headers using control+alt+h? I suggest that the set of 
> available key combinations that are as agnostic as the web sites we 
> want to implement them on is nearly null. In light of that, a clean 
> slate approach seems appropriate. Given no constraints on keystrokes 
> other than trying to give a nod to what is common (familiar) in 
> existing implementations to lower cognitive load, what would make the 
> most sense for navigating and controlling widgets?

For what it's worth, I completely agree with you. The argument I've
heard against that is that there needs to be a consistent mechanism for
keyboard navigation even if not controlled by AT like a screen reader.
To that, I replied that the user agent should implement the key
commands.

For example, I can activate the menus or form controls in Safari with or
without VoiceOver. The same should be true of all ARIA widgets in that
UA and AT control web application widgets in the exact same way as the
desktop equivalents. Although I firmly believe this is the right
approach, not all browsers currently support DOM mutation events
properly, and that feature is required for this approach to be a
practical solution.

At this point, I've started mostly ignoring the DHTML Style Guide as an
overly-complex, but nice-to-have stop-gap measure until user agents
support all these controls natively. I'm not saying this to make enemies
in the DHTML Style Guide Working Group, but that will probably happen
anyway. I'd be more on board with the more simple approach Victor
mentioned: very basic navigational controls, including the keystroke to
open a contextual menu that contains all the more-complex methods of
navigation and control.

James

Received on Wednesday, 19 November 2008 20:34:46 UTC