RE: Accesskey: there are "techniques"?

We have been working on this quite a lot:

We had I think come up with a standardized map of the page, whereby
visually impaired users can click on a standardized access key to reach
a particular section of any website and also an automatic rendering that
provides a synopses based on site links (Pagemap) - It was numbers base,
But nhen daveP from RNIB suggested multi-level page map - so we had to
switch to letters (we were over ten links)


Take a look at http://www.ubaccess.com/accinfo_pagemap.html for how to
install standard acess keys

Then we had diffrent levels of inter page navigation
See
>
http://69.10.136.194/applications/swap/demo/level1/www.rnib.org/pagemap/
www.rnib.org 
>
http://69.10.136.194/applications/swap/demo/www.rnib.org/pagemap/www.rni
b.org

I would be interested in feed back.

BTW: If anyone want this install on their sites I am happy to guide you
through it.


All the best
Lisa Seeman
 
Visit us at the UB Access website
UB Access - Moving internet accessibility
 


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: Saturday, September 27, 2003 5:21 AM
To: Tom Croucher
Cc: 'Yvette P. Hoitink'; 'WCAG List'
Subject: RE: Accesskey: there are "techniques"?



I basically agree with Tom.

Bearing in mind the wide range of user agents (I have had two that
support accesskey for more than 3 years - iCab on a succession of Macs
and my old cellphone (which I still use) it isn't accurate to say there
are 36 keys - almost any unicode character is allowed, including
sensible ones like arabic or thai characters.

Maurizio is right - we have a problem with expectations of users (it
isn't helped by people saying "click alt + the key to activate", since
that isn't the method for quite a lot of user agents). But it isn't
unsolvable, it just needs to be better managed.

One thing to do is where applicable use the link element (or at least
rel attributes in links) - many browsers now support this, and it
provides consistency in the browser. In practice, it means that an Opera
keyboard user can press a aprticular key to go to the "next" page or
"home page" for any site that follows this piece of HTML 1 and above,
while a mozilla user will have different keys to press, but they change
with the browser, not the page. (iCab doesn't make them available from
the keyboard I don't think, which is a shame, since it was one of the
first graphic browsers to make a big deal out of them).

cheers

Chaals

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Tom Croucher wrote:

>
>Surely this is user agents issue rather than an accesskey issue. Opera 
>uses an accesskey mode which turns off its default shortcuts while in 
>that mode. Since you can toggle the mode on and off you know exactly 
>what you are getting. It seems to me that developers shouldn't feel 
>hamstrung by any implementation (however large the IE market slice is) 
>of accesskeys in UAs, there are 36 keys to use and we should use them. 
>On complex sites having an intuitive letter for the accesskeys can make

>a big difference.

Received on Wednesday, 1 October 2003 10:27:51 UTC