RE: Accesskey: there are "techniques"?

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