significant motor disabilities

Hi all,

I've been thinking about accommodating severe motor disabilities and put 
together demo of an on-line tool with features that I think would be useful 
in browsers.  The tool

1. assigns keyboard shortcuts (e.g. a, b, c, ... aa, ab, ac... aaa, aab, 
aac...) to every link on the page.  A typical shortcut looks like this:

{ae} free range chickens

So if a page has 200 links, the person doesn't have to press the tab key 
200 time which, for a person with a motor disability, can take several 
minutes. By the way, these aren't access keys (which are limited to 1 
letter).  Instead, you use them with a kluge: you program keyboard or AAC 
macros to do a search that jumps to the shortcut.

2. The tool also places a button next to every object that has a 
mouseover.  You can get to the button with the above shortcut or with the 
tab key and it produces the mouseover effect.

This is a crude demo.  it doesn't do image maps, and gets confused by 
javascript. I'm offering these as implementations to help them make their 
way into browsers.

The demo and an accommpaning white paper is at

http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/aac-web/

Len
p.s.
I'm going to be off-line for about a month starting monday 4/30 so I 
wouldn't be in the discusssion except maybe a bit just before then.  Enjoy!
--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2001 14:46:08 UTC