Re: Accesskey implementations...

Hello Chaals,
Read the thread with great interest. This is excellent news. Updating
my opera now. tried to get the documentation but the link does not
work, nor does the link from the extension download page. I also tried
 http://my.opera.com/chaals/axcesskey and
http://my.opera.com/chaals/accesskey to no avail.

More thought later, when I have played with it.
Jim

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 3:28 AM, Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> about a decade ago when I was actively involved here I used to waffle on a
> lot about accesskey... In UAAG 1 there ended up some requirement about how
> current interface bindings should be available to the author, and
> configurable, which was a generalisation (probably to the point of
> incomprehensibility) about how accesskeys *should* be handled.
>
> Recently I put this in to practice as an extension to Opera. In order to see
> it working you need the Opera 11 beta, and then you can get it from
> https://addons.labs.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/excesskey/?display=en
> - sorry screenreader folks, the documentation at
> http://my.opera.com/chaals/excesskey is pretty accessible but the Beta
> version of Opera is more or less unusable, especially the extension stuff,
> with a screenreader ;(.
>
> It is a work in progress. But it clarified a bunch of things for me (apart
> from the fact that I am not a brilliant developer and need to do a whole lot
> more work ;) ).
>
> - accesskeys are really handy, if you know when they are there and discover
> the sites that use them well (*to do: allow users to mark a site as 'don't
> bother' so a different icon shows.)
> - It really matters whether you can choose the keys. I made a test page that
> uses ł,आ,س,ф,± as accesskeys - all of which are things I know how to
> generate and are from time to time reasonable keys to use. (I also used ☆
> and ✐ to see what happens ;) ). The common english-language convention of
> using numbers is terrible for french people who use the traditional 'azerty'
> layout, but it would make perfect sense for them to use &é"'(§è!çà which are
> the natural defaults for the same physical keys. Yet many french people use
> english sites, and to some extent vice versa.
> - it makes perfect sense to allow accesskey='say this please', if you shift
> the responsibility for assigning keys to the User Agent (which you need to
> do in order to allow the user to decide what keys they will use). Because I
> have already begun sketching out an architecture that lets you assign
> non-keyboard interactions, and one obvious one is voice where whole words or
> phrases are *better* than single letters.
> - if you can discover what accesskeys are there before you activate them, it
> makes much more sense to have them directly activate a link or control than
> just focus it, where that's a logical thing to do. Of course it's not
> applicable to text input boxes :)
> - shift-esc is not a great activation shortcut for the accesskey menu. I
> remap mine to '.' which is more convenient for me (sits between
> search-in-page and search-for-links). YMMV.
>
> The basic idea is this:
> 1. There is a status indicator to tell you if there are accesskeys defined
> in the page. This is an improvement on Opera's accesskey menu (normally
> activated by shift-esc) which will list the accesskeys defined, or tell you
> there are none. Which in turn is an improvement on guessing what they might
> be or where they might be described.
>
> 2. The extension actually cleans up the accesskeys so they can be fired -
> i.e. make sure that each is a single unique character (Opera has a bug where
> accesskey="oops" will break the accesskey menu, and while you can navigate
> the menu with the mouse it doesn't deal nicely with two uses of the same
> key).
>
> 3. In the preferences (open extension manager, right click on the funny cog
> wheel next to the 'uninstall button') you can select the keys that you want
> to be used to assign accesskeys. For example, numbers are not very helpful
> for users of french azerty keyboards, since you need to use shift to produce
> them. And cyrillic is more useful for many russian users since those are the
> letters they produce by default. It has been tested with cyrillic, arabic,
> and various other wierd characters.
>
> As the documentation explains, right now it uses Opera's native accesskey
> menu, but for various reasons I am tempted to try and replace that. But
> first I want to make some improvements in the underlying code and
> capabilities - so it won't get any prettiness enhancements for a while.
>
> cheers
>
> Chaals
>
> --
> Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
>    je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
> http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
>
>



-- 
Jim Allan, Accessibility Coordinator & Webmaster

Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired

1100 W. 45th St., Austin, Texas 78756

voice 512.206.9315    fax: 512.206.9264  http://www.tsbvi.edu/

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." McLuhan, 1964

Received on Thursday, 2 December 2010 16:03:05 UTC