Re: Find As You Type (Mozilla) and ACCESSKEY

Jesper,


you might like to visit http;//www.peepo.com and after absorbing for a 
short while, move the mouse around, then type a letter.
this has been up for quite some time now, about 2 years

jonathan

On Wednesday, February 26, 2003, at 09:35 AM, Jesper Tverskov wrote:

>
>
> It has been suggested in this mailing list, that "Find As You Type" in 
> the Mozilla browser could be an alternative or a supplement to the use 
> of the HTML ACCESSKEY attribute.
>
> I have now tested this very interesting new feature. All about the 
> feature is documented here:
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/typeaheadfind.html
>
>
> I have some comments:
>
> 1)
>
> "Find As You Type" is very close to being the user agent solution I 
> propose in my article: "Use first letter as ACCESSKEY".
> http://localhost/artikel.aspx?xml=20021031&lg=en
>
> Great that at least Mozilla is listening to the maidens prayers ;-)
>
> This is what I propose in the article:
>
> "First letter as access key should be implemented already today by the 
> authors of web pages. But in the long run, it is also an issue for 
> browsers and other user agents. One day the browsers should by default 
> generate first letter of the link name as access key to the link for 
> all links encountered on a web page."
>
> In the article I propose ways for the web page authors to overrule the 
> default behavior of the browser using CSS. Mozilla has come up with an 
> even better solution: No conflict between the HTML ACCESSKEY and the 
> browser implementation of "Find As You Type" (very similar to using 
> first letter).
>
> 2)
>
> "Find As You Type", as it is, is a little too complicated to use as a 
> substitute for old-fashioned HTML ACCESSKEYS to links by most users. 
> The feature can be used for more than links, it can also be used for 
> text, and as default it is looking for more than the first letter of a 
> link name. But this could be changed in Mozilla's "preferences" by 
> power users:
>
> user_pref("accessibility.typeaheadfind.startlinksonly", false);    // 
> If true, matches only to the start of links when searching only for 
> links.
>
> 3)
>
> "Find As You Type" is very close to being the user agent solution I 
> propose. But as I say in my article, it can take many years before let 
> us say 90 percent of user agents support such a feature. In the mean 
> time I see no reasons why not to use "First letter as ACCESSKEY" as 
> proposed in the article. Both IE and Mozilla (at least in Windows) 
> supports the two different ways of pressing the ALT key (Cmd in Mac), 
> that is: more than 90 percent of the user agents supports it.
>
> Remember the important advantages of using first letter as access 
> keys. Systematically using the first letter of a link text as the 
> access key could be a simple, easy to understand and easy to remember 
> scheme.
>
> 1) Access keys can be generated by code (important in these CMS days)
> 2) You do not have to mark the access key letter in the link text, it 
> is always the first letter
> 3) You can use access keys for more than a handful of links
>
> Since implementations like "Find As You Type" makes it irrelevant to 
> use CSS (in some future spec) to overrule the default behavior of the 
> browser, I will have to make some changes to the section: 
> "Perspective" in my article.
>
> We have come a long way!
>
> Cheers,
> Jesper Tverskov
>

Received on Wednesday, 26 February 2003 06:22:13 UTC