- From: Tom Croucher <tcroucher@netalleynetworks.com>
- Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 12:52:36 +0100
- To: "'Maurizio Boscarol'" <maurizio@usabile.it>, "'Charles Oppermann'" <charles@coppersoftware.com>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Taken directly from the, Guidelines for UK government websites: Framework for senior managers, document "Appendix C: UK government accesskeys standard Webmasters who have used hypertext mark up language (HTML) 4.0 or above in marking up their sites can introduce the use of the accesskey attribute. This is designed to assist users who have difficulties using a mouse or who prefer to use keyboard shortcuts. Some government websites have already implemented accesskeys. Because there is no accepted standard, these accesskeys are not consistent across UK government sites. We recommend a core of 10 links assigned to numerical values rather than letters. This will avoid conflict with other software. Webmasters should also provide a menu of accesskeys on their site and the information they link to. Webmasters can of course extend this system by attributing appropriate letters from the remaining 25 alphabetic characters to pages within their website. Listed below is the suggested standard: S skip navigation 1 home page 2 what's new page 3 site map 4 to the search facility on the site 5 frequently asked questions (F A Qs) 6 help page/facility 7 complaints procedure 8 terms and conditions (including privacy statement) 9 feedback page 0 the menu page of accesskeys detailing the accesskeys are being used within the website and the information or services they link to." As some of you may know I a developer for the open source Plone content management system. I have spent a lot of time trying to make it accessible and part of that was having i18n accesskeys. Although not all our supported generally languages have had the access done I would like to talk about the approach we used. We started by using the English accesskeys (devised by myself and our UI guy) and using them as a template. These are necessarily complete and I will probably change them at the end of this discussion after seeing all the good ideas. t Tabs l Login n Navigation menu s Search b Breadcrumb items u Personal Bar c Folder contents v View Item e Edit Item p Item Properties w Change Item's State There are three things that are important to be noted in this implementation. Firstly the items are contextual, not all pages will have all of the accesskeys, obviously depending on which widgets are present. Secondly we used accesskeys in groups, so for example as user could press "s" repeatedly to choose first the search box and then the search button. Or "n" repeatedly would go cycle through the navigation items list sequentially". Finally the accesskeys were also designed to act as shortcuts to commonly used items such as "edit" for all users, although this was not a primary concern we did not feel it infringed on the needs of PwDs. When translating these accesskeys into other languages we asked the translators to translate the concepts not the keys. So we prioritised search as an important concept. In English this meant it would have "s" no matter what other concepts might start with that letter. We asked translators to apply these priorities to their translation. So for example in German login is anmelden and view is anzeigen, so we prioritised view and gave it "a". This is different to the English, and we are proud of handling different languages and cultures properly. If anyone has any thoughts on this system I would love to hear them, we are always striving to make Plone better, that's what open source is all about. Tom Co-founder Netalley Networks (http://www.netalleynetworks.com), BSc(Hons) Computing Student / Information Services Staff University of Sunderland (http://www.sunderland.ac.uk), Accessibility Co-ordinator Plone CMS (http://www.plone.org) -----Original Message----- From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Maurizio Boscarol Sent: 26 September 2003 11:49 To: Charles Oppermann; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org Subject: Re: Accesskey: there are "techniques"? From: "Charles Oppermann" > On first glance, this proposal seems fraught with problems. One that I can > think up off the top of my head would be Far Eastern languages, that often > use numbers for menu access keys. What do you mean? We (the ones Roberto mentioned, here in little Italy... :-) suggest using numbers for accesskey. Far Eastern languages already use numbers? This wolud be okay. Or do they use number for shortcut software menu? This would be a problem. The problem with accesskey is that it the alphabetic values create conflict with browsers or user agents' shortcut. So we need to suggest neutral (numeric?) chars for use, better if with some standardization. No accessibility feature should have implementation problem in the real world if we want somebody to use them. Maurizio Boscarol http://www.usabile.it
Received on Friday, 26 September 2003 07:52:54 UTC