[Bug 10660] use < and > and not &#8592; and &#8594; to indicate previous and next

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10660

--- Comment #5 from Gregory J. Rosmaita <oedipus@hicom.net> 2010-11-15 21:51:13 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #4)
hixie, thanks for your response -- 

QUOTE
Having said that, if people really do want to navigate the site that way, we
could add accesskey="" attributes on the links with "<" and ">" as the values.
Would that help? 
UNQUOTE

i think that adding < and > as accesskey values for the previous and next is a
good idea, as long as there is some documentation somewhere that details the
conventions used in the spec: 

* the keys "<" and ">" have been assigned as access keys for "previous" and 
  "next" respectively

personally, i would like to see a "Formatting Conventions Used in this
Document" section added to the W3C boilerplate intro, so that spec authors can
document for spec readers what precisely the formatting conventions used in the
spec are, including a list of global accesskeys

one serious problem with large web pages and assistive technologies is focus
maintenance, which is why someone deep in the document might want to invoke a
list of links with which to go to the previous or next section -- having "<"
and ">" assigned as accesskeys WILL help, but the user should be able to
generate the first character used as hyyperlink text without invoking a
macro/special key-combo to generate the "special character"

your point about the ">" character in a list of links is well-taken -- no one
would need to generate the last character in hyperlink text in order to use it

one last point of consideration -- how broad is the support for
non-alpha-numeric characters when used as accesskeys?  i have an old UAAG 1.0
proposed test page to test support for non-alpha-numeric characters used as
accesskeys:

http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/wai/ua/tests/non-alpha-numeric_accesskey_test1.html

-- 
Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are on the CC list for the bug.

Received on Monday, 15 November 2010 21:51:18 UTC