- From: Leonard R. Kasday <kasday@acm.org>
- Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 09:00:59 -0400
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
I tested the visual behavior of the screen, which is relevant for people with motor disabilities, even when they are sighted. With MSIE 5.00.2614.3500 Looking at accesskey file 1 No visible effect of pressing ALT-A, ALT-B, etc. except where they happened to pull down a menu from the menu bar, e.g. ALT-F is the file menu. Looking at accesskey file 3 There's no longer any interference from the menu bar. I see the URI in the bottom status line change, e.g. when I press ALT-J it appends #j to the URL there. In other words it becomes http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/tests/accesskey3.html#j However, the screen does not scroll down to that point. So this would not help a person with a motor disability. It turns out that if you want the screen to scroll to the A tag with the accesskey, you need to make the tag a link, not an anchor. In other words, it has to have an href attribute. You can verify this with http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday/wai/accesskey.html which has a link and an anchor at the bottom. The link will cause scrolling, but the anchor will not. This isn't the suggested behavior of HTML 4.01 [1], which states that quote For example, when a user activates a link defined by the A element, the user agent generally follows the link unquote In MSIE 5 isn't following the link. It's just giving focus to the link. You have to then press return to follow the link (actually, I think the MSIE behavior is better than what HTML 4.01 suggests). Note however, that HTML spec doesn't really specify what should happen: it has that word "generally"... so it seems to be trying to describe the status quo. (And it turns out that, like I mentioned, it isn't describing the status quo, at least as far as MSIE 5 is concerned). What HTML 4.01 does specify is that quote Pressing an access key assigned to an element gives focus to the element unquote That doesn't seem to mean anything for anchors (what does it mean to give an anchor "focus"), so the fact that nothing happens for anchors seems to be consistent with the spec. Bottom Line: We need to add a specification to HTML to specify behavior for anchors: viz. that it scroll to that point. references [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#adef-accesskey -- Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D. Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and Department of Electrical Engineering Temple University 423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122 kasday@acm.org http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday (215) 204-2247 (voice) (800) 750-7428 (TTY) The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/
Received on Thursday, 6 July 2000 08:59:39 UTC