Re: Accesskey - spec proposal

On Tue, 03 Jul 2007 19:22:50 +0200, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>  
wrote:

> On Jul 3, 2007, at 4:08 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 03 Jul 2007 12:30:20 +0200, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>

>>> It also seems that accesskey would not work very well on mobile  
>>> devices, which often have limited keyboards.
>>
>> The WAP forum (now OMA) obviously disagreed with you, since on WAP  
>> browsers accesskey (although restricted to numbers 1-9) is widely  
>> interoperable.
>
> 1) That's obviously not interoperable with the use of accesskey in  
> general web content (as opposed to waled garden "mobile web" content),  
> since the few real sites that use accesskey do not restrict themselves  
> to 1-9. Although if they did, it might be easier to reserve keybindings  
> for them...

(Actually, a substantial proportion of the sites that do use accesskey  
(e.g. many UK government and quango sites) use numbers as a strategy to  
workaround the Mozilla and IE implementations that just use alt+key -  
since numbers are less likely to break user interface conventions. Common  
advice given is to use numbers - both for mobile compatibility and dealing  
with these implementations. But this is not necessary with the proposed  
design).

> 2) How does this work on phones that have a full alphabetic keyboard,  
> but where you have to hold down a special numeric modifier to type  
> numbers in any context but the dialer? (For instance, my Nokia e61). And  
> does an unmodified 1-9 still act as a rapid access key when typing into  
> a text field on such a phone?

See the implementation notes[1].

> 3) How does work on phones that are all touchscreen and don't even show  
> an onscreen keyboard most of the time?

Ditto.

> High-end phones are usually in categories 2 and 3, so it sounds like the  
> types of phones capable of rendering real web content well haven't been  
> considered in this design.

(Actually, except in Japan and Korea high-end phones are a small  
proportion of web browsing (and of the market in general) compared to  
basic phones that run something like Opera mini. And "usually" is  
overstating the case - "more commonly" might be more like it.)

The design proposed allows for a screen-based navigation that doesn't  
require any keys at all, just an activation gesture. Furthermore even this  
is listed as a *should*. In what way did this not take such devices into  
account?

[1] http://www.w3.org/mid/op.tuv8d7fvwxe0ny@pc052.coreteam.oslo.opera.com

cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
   hablo español  -  je parle français  -  jeg lærer norsk
chaals@opera.com    Catch up: Speed Dial   http://opera.com

Received on Wednesday, 4 July 2007 09:14:39 UTC