Re: Keyboard shortcuts in Javascript

Yeah, fixing shortcut key will be awesome.  I think enlarging the scope a little and providing a generic mechanism to list available "commands" or "actions" on a page or a widget on a page is also useful for accessibility purposes because not everyone has access to keyboards or pointing devices.

> On Oct 21, 2015, at 7:16 AM, Chaals McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex-team.ru> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I presume everyone does this.
> 
> It's a terrible idea. We really should find a way to stop doing it.
> 
> I think a key to being able to give them up is to make accesskey work. For the moment implementations still range between bad and abysmal ;( although the overall standard is way better than it was.
> 
> If we don't do that, we're going to be stuck replicating it and hoping we somehow do it different this time. If we do fix it, we have teh benefit of not breaking a lot of existing content (last I checked, accesskey was used by about 1.5% of content - and it tends to be on big sites people use a lot).
> 
> Note there are a few key things to keep in mind:
> 
> accesskey shouldn't replace user intention events or other standard things like <a rel="help">. If we have a standard event for "Toggle Bold Text" or "make this a link" then it *shouldn't* need an activation, since it should have one in the UI. (But then, following links in SVG should have one too, and doesn't in a fair number of browsers ;( ).
> 
> accesskey should be an author *hint* to activate an element (or function), and the user agent should be free to assign some other activation behaviour - a key that is more readily available (accesskey="я" is perfectly sensible in some cases, but should be mapped for latin keyboard users - and in Opera not directly to the Z key that it already uses for enhanced navigation)
> 
> users should be able to find out what shortcut activation has been assigned, from the user agent. Asking authors to guess is stupid at best because they don't get it right, and impossible at worst because if you allow for customisation the odds of them getting it right are probably even smaller.
> 
> One of these days - maybe even in time for TPAC - I hope to get my accesskey proposal finished. It's currently a mess on github...
> 
> cheers
> 
> -- 
> Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
> chaals@yandex-team.ru - - - Find more at http://yandex.com
>

Received on Wednesday, 21 October 2015 01:21:00 UTC