Re: Accesskey - spec proposal

On Jul 3, 2007, at 4:19 AM, Michael(tm) Smith wrote:

> 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.

1) See my message to Chaals about phones where typing 0-9 at an  
arbitrary time is not all that easy.
2) Something that is used only on mobile-specific sites will not help  
us design a feature for mobile devices that can browse the real web,  
not just the "mobile web". Are any of these sites even using real  
HTML? My impression is that Japanese mobile-specific sites are coded  
using a variety of mutually incompatible mobile-specific languages,  
like cHTML, XHTML Basic, XHTML-MP, etc.

I'd like to hear about a design that works for browsing the real web  
using devices like the Nokia e61, the iPhone, and other phones with  
close to full-strength browsers such as Opera Mobile.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 17:56:05 UTC