RE: Updated accesskey.next material

Léonie Watson wrote:
>
> It intuitively feels like there might be some overlap/connection into
> IndieUI with this. Not familiar enough with IndieUI to offer any more
> on that possibility though.

I agree with your intuition Léonie, which is why I still have a (perhaps
unreasonable) distaste for author-declared "keys".

Off the top of my head, I would likely prefer to see something like <access
role="navigation">, although if user-agents were smart, they wouldn't need
the access part: they could expose all of the landmark roles (or HTML5
landmark elements) into a "tree" that end users could map 'hotkeys' to
themselves (or swiping gestures, etc.). The advantage here of course is that
for *every* site that used <nav> or <div role="navigation">, if the
individual end user mapped that construct to their own keypress "shortcut"
(Alt+Shift+F2) it would *always* work across all sites, rather than trying
to learn or discover individual site-assigned keys.

I know Chaals argues that those author-assigned keys should (MUST?) be
re-mappable, but it still requires the "search if they exist in the first
place, and then do the remapping" exercise that I question the
usability/usefulness of. For infrequently visited sites, it doesn't seem
like the effort would be worthwhile, whereas if I could always invoke
Alt+Shift+F2 and it brough me to the page's declared navigation block, then
all of a sudden I have something reliable on my hands that I can use
"everywhere".

Another off-the-top thought: allowing to map hotkeys to any aria-role would
provide us with two potential wins:

a) it expands the ability to hot-key to anything, not just regions
(landmarks)
b) it expands the usefulness of the aria @role attributes, as designers who
may not be thinking first about accessibility could still use aria-roles to
achieve "mainstream" functionality, and we've often thought/stated that
making ARIA about more than just AT would be a positive thing. Rich S. told
me he had some success when he started to get some of the internal designers
at his shop to start using aria-roles as CSS selectors - they loved the idea
of repurposing an accessibility "thing" for something other than
accessibility, so there is a minor precedent there...


> Also wondering about use cases for other forms of interaction? For
> example the ability to move to the next/previous element/object - as is
> possible with the JavaScript driven shortcuts provided by Google/Gmail
> for example.
> Is this something a re-engineered accesskey could support?

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/links.html#sequential-link-types

See also Bruce Lawson's now 5 year old blog post for some other
outside-the-box thinking (not 100% related, although he does 'diss'
accesskeys: http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2009/rel-accessibility/

JF

Received on Thursday, 20 November 2014 20:01:26 UTC