- From: maou <maou@csi.forth.gr>
- Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 21:17:18 +0300
- To: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
Hello, My name is Napoleon Maou and I am a staff member at the Assistive Technology and Human computer Interaction (AT&HCI) laboratory , at the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH). I am interested in technologies that will make the Web, or any other information system, accessible to people with disabilities. At FORTH I have participated in the development of the AVANTI unified browser, a browser that in addition to motor abled users, is accessible by blind and motor impaired users. I would like to comment on the subject of sequential navigation within a View. I believe that there should be only one generalized mechanism to navigate elements within a view. Section 6.1 talks about a mechanism for sequential navigation of links, form elements and elements with longdesc( using keyboard commands ) , and section 7.2 talks about another mechanism that can be used for sequential navigation of Headers or other elements ( using menus and menu shortcuts ). The problems I see with the existence of two mechanisms are the following 1) There exist more than one keyboard commands or menu keyboard shortcuts, which have essentially the same meaning. "Move to next item". For example if we have menu items to navigate Headers and Paragraphs then there will be a "Next Header", a "Next Paragraph" and a "Next link/longdesc/form element" command. 2) If the user wants to navigate Headers and paragraphs then the current mechanisms does not allow him to do that. He can navigate Headers or Paragraphs but not both at the same time. 3) For people with motor disabilities using menus to navigate will be very time consuming. 4) For blind people there is the problem of having to memorize more keyboard commands than are needed. Proposed Mechanism --------------------------- I believe that the UA should provide to the user a simple generalized mechanism to navigate any elements in the view. This mechanism should: a) Allow the user to select the elements he wants to navigate. b) Provide commands to move among the elements of the view. A mechanism like that I believe will be easy to use and is general enough to allow the user to navigate any element combinations. Napoleon Maou -- Napoleon Maou Software Engineer AT&HCI Laboratory ICS-FORTH voice : +3081391742 email : maou@ics.forth.gr WWW : www.ics.forth.gr
Received on Friday, 31 July 1998 14:17:23 UTC