keyboard navigation issues

Hi,

I am joining the discussion about keyboard navigation rather late,
but in my view the way to resolve some of these problems is that the
guidelines recommend the support for keyboard navigation and that the
placing of the actual keystrokes is customisable by the user. Finally
it should be possible to save some kind of file with the assigned
keystrokes something I will call keystroke keyboard layout.  so that
it will be possible to distribute keystroke  layouts made with a certain
group of disabled in mind. In this way we do not need to spend a lot
of time finding out wich keystrokes are not in use by the different
operating systems. And by making it possible for the user to define
what keys to use, we avoid the problems that can arise when one group
wants to use keystrokes found on the numeric keypad while others
e.g. screen reader users will protest to such a placement of
keystrokes, because most screen readers rely on the use of the keypad
for special screen reader commands.

If all keystrokes can be assigned to keystrokes by the user, we also
avoid the discussion concerning the privilidged position of operating
system or application specific keystrokes. If everything can be
configured the user can decide to overwrite operating system hotkeys,
if the user finds other functions to be more valuable than preserving
system wide hotkeys. System hotkeys is a good idea, but at least for
screen reader users, you get used to very many application specific
hotkeys, and therefore the thought of altering operating system
hotkeys is not unthinkable, specially not when we is approaching a
situation where we lack keys to assign to extra keyboard shortcuts. 

Regards

Claus Thøgersen

Received on Friday, 14 August 1998 08:33:47 UTC