[Bug 13575] Retrieving keybindings in automation-friendly format

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13575

Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
                 CC|                            |ian@hixie.ch
         Resolution|                            |WONTFIX

--- Comment #2 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> 2011-08-12 22:03:08 UTC ---
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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale:

> Aaron asks his web browser to display a list of the currently
> active keyboard shortcuts. [...] it would do this by
> enumerating the command elements and retrieving each one's accessKeyLabel
> property. The user agent wants to make the list more useful [...] it cannot easily
> parse the accessKeyLabel string, as it knows neither the names the user agent
> will use for modifier keys (e.g. "Ctrl", "control", an arrow glyph, etc.) nor
> what method will be use to concatenate them (e.g. "Ctrl+a", "Ctrl/A", "^A",
> "A+Control", an arrow plus "A", etc., all of which may depend on the platform,
> user agent, language, and/or locale).

The user agent does know what names the user agent will use. It's itself.


> Louis has a browser add-in that lets him specify a keyboard
> input and it tells him what function or element that is currently mapped to.
> The user enters a representation of a key or key combination as a text string
> using a consistent format (e.g. "Ctrl+[") regardless of which platform it's
> running on. To determine which command this is assigned to, it converts the
> string into the automation-friendly equivalent defined by the HTML5 spec, and
> compares that to the representation associated with each command recognized by
> the browser (per 4.11.5 Commands).
> 
> An automation-friendly representation could either be a list of codes
> representing keys and their modifiers (e.g. an integer representing the F5 key
> along with a mask of bits representing Alt and Shift modification) or it could
> be a string compounded from substrings that are language-, locale- and
> platform-neutral (e.g. "Ctrl+A" for the combination of the "A" key and the
> equivalent of the control key, even in environments where the latter is not
> normally written as "Ctrl"). 
> 
> Either format could either be returned by an element using a property analogous
> to accessKeyLabel, or user agents could be required to provide a function to
> convert the user-friendly string returned by accessKeyLabel into an
> automation-friendly representation.

This seems entirely possible. It's a UA implementation issue.


> Issue: Are there cases where an accessibility aid may be able to interact with
> with the DOM in order to query keybindings, yet still need to simulate the key
> combination associated with a control or command rather than activating it
> programmatically? This would certainly be useful for test automation, but are
> there accessibility cases?

ATs should just communicate to the UAs directly, not via the JS APIs. That
makes no sense.

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Received on Friday, 12 August 2011 22:03:10 UTC