- From: John Foliot <john@foliot.ca>
- Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 12:00:45 -0800
- To: <LWatson@PacielloGroup.com>, <chaals@yandex-team.ru>, "'HTML Accessibility Task Force'" <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
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