Re: accesskeys - standards for which keys do what?

Alternatively the implementation could offer a seperate view of the page,
which lists the accesskeys, explains how to use them on the specific
platform (eg CTRL+ALT+key, say "access + key", press the item you want)
and uses TITLE and LABEL to give information about the elements to which
the keys refer. This is analagous to what Amaya does with its 'link' view.

There are any number of ways to implement it in a user interface - I don't
think we need to describe them all, let alone prescribe them.

Charles McCathieNevile

On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Jon Gunderson wrote:

  Modifiers for Accesskeys will be dependent on the keyboard model of the
  operating system and therefore would be difficult to assign a standard of
  "ALT".  Even with operating systems with the "ALT" key some operating
  system already assign values to some of the keys.
  
  I think one of the major issues with Accesskeys is that the accesskey
  information be rendered visually on the disaplay so people know that there
  is an accesskey he available.  This could be done by underlining the
  character in the label of the control or link associated with the
  accesskey.  If the accesskey is not a part of the label, then the user
  agent could add the letter in parenthesis after the label or link.
  
  Jon
  
  
  At 11:20 AM 1/27/99 -0500, B.K. DeLong wrote:
  >At 03:58 PM 1/27/99 +0000, Chris Croome wrote:
  >>Are there any standard access keys assignments? E.g. Alt-S for search or
  >>whatever? And if not is there a danger that every site will have a
  different 
  >>set
  >>of keys for people to learn?
  >
  >At this point, Internet Explorer is the only browser that has some
  >implementation of ACCESSKEY. It appears they implemented it for elements A,
  >BUTTON, INPUT, LABEL and TEXTAREA in IE4.0 and elements AREA and LEGEND in
  >IE5.0. 
  >
  >According to the HTML 4.0 recommendation, there are no "standard accesskeys."
  >http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/interact/forms.html#adef-accesskey
  >
  >Your best bet is to check with Microsoft and ask them for a list of all IE
  >Alt-key assignments. The Mozilla Project has their NGLayout/Gecko team
  >currently working on an implementation for accesskey:
  >http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=959
  >
  >
  >>On reflection it was silly to set Alt-H to anything as it will prevent the
  >Help
  >>menu in the browser being accessed...
  >
  >Somewhere it would be helpful to keep an index of ALT-key functions for
  >some of the major browsers.
  >
  >Good comments- thanks for bringing this to light.
  >--
  >B.K. DeLong                  360 Huntington Ave.
  >Director                         Suite 140CSC-305
  >New England Chapter     Boston, MA 02115
  >World Organization        (617) 247-3753
  >of Webmasters
  >
  >http://www.world-webmasters.org
  >bkdelong@naw.org
  > 
  Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
  Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
  Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
  University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
  1207 S. Oak Street
  Champaign, IL 61820
  
  Voice: 217-244-5870
  Fax: 217-333-0248
  E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
  WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
  	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
  

--Charles McCathieNevile            mailto:charles@w3.org
phone: +1 617 258 0992   http://purl.oclc.org/net/charles
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative    http://www.w3.org/WAI
MIT/LCS  -  545 Technology sq., Cambridge MA, 02139,  USA

Received on Thursday, 28 January 1999 10:27:20 UTC