- From: Matthew Thomas <mpt@myrealbox.com>
- Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 03:06:01 +1200
On 25 Jul, 2004, at 12:04 AM, Jim Ley wrote: > > On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 14:14:30 +0300, Kai Hendry <hendry at cs.helsinki.fi> > wrote: >> >> 1) Users can not easily tell what the accesskeys are. > > Their UA should do a better job of informing them. Agreed. (For example, four years ago I requested for Mozilla: "Where an HTML element has an ACCESSKEY, if a character (case-insensitively) equivalent to the accesskey is present in the element's label, that character should be underlined by default." <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56701>) >> 2) Accesskeys can conflict with the UA binds. > > Their UA should do a better job of picking a key combination to > activate them that doesn't interfere with their default UA binds. > > There's lots of possible modifier keys available to a UA - Disagreed. Perhaps you could name some of these "lots of possible modifer keys available". Four years ago, I couldn't find any on Windows, and only Control on Mac OS. <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51940#c4> Since then, the situation has only become worse. (To wit, Mac OS X has appropriated the Control key for emacs keybindings in text fields. This makes its behavior unpredictable for HTML accesskeys, since the thing you are trying to move focus away from may well be a text/password field.) > why override ALT. Because that's what the native GUI uses, so if users expect it to be anything, they expect it to be Alt. (Which is unfortunate, since UAs are already using Alt for other things.) > Yes AccessKey isn't that well specified, but I think it can be fixed > rather than completely removed. > ... If mass-market UAs are reliably browbeaten by cries of "accessibility!" into implementing accesskey when they shouldn't (i.e. when all available modifier keys are already used by the UA or the operating environment), perhaps the world would be better off if the attribute was removed from HTML. However I doubt WhatWG will be doing that, since Ian has said "A document that conforms to HTML4 Strict will always conform to any relevant spec created by WHATWG" <http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2004-July/ 001330.html>. Removing accesskey from HTML5 would break this dictum by making some HTML4-Strict-conformant documents HTML5-nonconformant. What the Web Forms spec *could* do is recommend that UAs ignore the accesskey attribute in those environments where implementing it would conflict with environment conventions (in the same way as it could recommend that UAs follow environment conventions for <label>). If necessary, the spec could even include a statement discouraging authors from using the attribute. -- Matthew Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/
Received on Saturday, 24 July 2004 08:06:01 UTC