Re: Accesskey - spec proposal

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, 2007-07-03 03:30 -0700:

> It also seems that accesskey would not work very well on mobile devices, 
> which often have limited keyboards. And screen real estate is too precious 
> to add a menu just for this relatively obscure feature.

Access-key markup on mobile sites is already in wide use for
mobile-specific sites in Japan at least. It works quite well and
users depend on it. The way that it's handled is that if you mark
up an element with an access key, a 0-9 numbered button or star or
hash button is rendered inline next to the displayed content of
element. By convention that has grown up around it, the elements
with access keys are generally grouped at the bottom of each page,
and the mappings/bindings are consistent across all pages at the
site. For example, for a given site, 0 always takes you up/home to
the home page for the site, while 4 (or maybe star) is
back/previous and 6 (or maybe hash) takes you forward/next.

The first time you visit a particular site, you do have to scroll
to the bottom to see what the access keys are for the page/site.
But you usually only need to do that once, to find out what they
are, then you remember it and don't have to look again (because,
like I said, they mappings/bindings are consistent across the site).

So we don't need to come up with any brilliant new ideas about how
to handling accesskey in the mobile-browsing context. That's
already been done.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://people.w3.org/mike/
http://sideshowbarker.net/