Re: [WebAIM] More data on accesskeys (New article written Nov. 1)

My apologies if this has already been addressed and I missed it, but...

Is there research available on use of accesskey implementations?

I would be curious to read about any user or users who either use the 
feature or who have tried and found it unhelpful.

John Foliot wrote:
> AFAIK, accesskey is still slated to be deprecated in XHTML 2, but what we
> are dealing with here is HTML/XHTML today, and sadly accesskey is still in
> that spec.
>
> XHTML 2 will deprecated accesskey in favor of the access element, which will
> take attributes such as @role and @ key (to which I am extremely concerned:
> if you have not already seen my piece "Access + Key Still Equals Accesskey"
> [http://www.wats.ca/show.php?contentid=47], I urge you to do so: the
> non-response by the Draft Authors to my concerns and specific questions is
> exactly the kind of elitist un-responsiveness that TBL alludes to in his
> recent posting [http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166] and Joe Clark
> rants about [http://blog.fawny.org/2006/10/28/tbl-html] </steps down from
> soapbox>.)
>
> The work that Jon et al are doing in this space is leading the way, although
> sadly none of it currently validates to a formal grammar... Is there anybody
> out there comfortable enough to hack a modified DTD together so that @role
> could validate today?  The one supplied with the example(s) does not (at
> least, I cannot show it to using both W3C and WDG online validation tools).
>
> To me, the long and the short of it is this is just one more reason why
> authors should not be deciding how end-users will approach and interact with
> the content.  Prof. Gunderson's examples show how by declaring the intent,
> but leaving the mapping to the end user, we have real and beneficial
> usability/accessibility.  In the immediate future, I continue to advocate
> non-use of the accesskey, but if/when required/desired to use solutions
> similar to Gez's PHP and AP scripts (and there are others out there) that
> give the mapping control to the end user, where it rightly belongs.
>
> JF
>
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Received on Thursday, 2 November 2006 17:52:50 UTC