RE: Re: Alt keys verses accesskey

aloha, again -- in addition, i should have noted that the phenomenon
described by daniel in his post (the apparent loss of core functionality in
the windows environment due to microsoft's choice of the ALT key as the
triggering mechanism for "accesskey") is replicated in the 3.x versions of
JFW -- CONTROL+A ("select all" on windows machines) followed by CONTROL+C
("copy to clipboard") copies not a copy of the visual rendering of a
document to the clipboard, but the JFW "view" (including
pseudo-pseudo-elemental text such as "link" "visited link" "mailto link"
"imagemap link", etc., depending upon the user's settings - for a detailed
description of how JFW aurally renders a page, consult the document that
resides at the following, obscenely long, URI:
<http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/wai/ua/longdesc/jfw-html-options-20000223.htm
l#user-experience-overview>

-----Original Message-----
From: gregory j. rosmaita [mailto:oedipus@hicom.net]
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 2:20 PM
To: dnewman@globalformats.com; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: Re: Alt keys verses accesskey

aloha, again!

i should have pointed out, as well, that the accesskey conflict you
described is not only IE-specific, but platform-specific as well -- hence,
it should NOT be considered a fatal flaw in the definition of ACCESSKEY
(which is, admittedly, ambiguous on the issue of "expected action in
response to the invocation of an ACCESSKEY, including whether invoking an
ACCESSKEY activates the element for which it was defined or whether it
merely establishes focus upon the element for which it was defined), but
rather, an implementation bug in IE5+ -- which, depending upon your
viewpoint, stems from the choice of ACCESSKEY trigger (the ALT key) or the
failure to provide a "pass-through" mechanism/keystroke which would allow an
author to define an ACCESSKEY without appearing to have broken IE's user
interface, and a user to trigger an ACCESSKEY without inadvertently opening
a menu item or to open a menu item without triggering an ACCESSKEY

gregory.

PS: for non-Windows implementations of ACCESSKEY, please refer to the
following post on the WAI-IG list, as well as responses to it:
<http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2001AprJun/0672.html>

PPS: there are also accesskey test pages in GL web space -- consult:
<http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/#techniques-tests>
for more details and links to the test pages...

Received on Tuesday, 28 August 2001 18:57:56 UTC