Documentation URI Re: Accesskey implementations...

On Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:02:30 +0100, Jim Allan <jimallan@tsbvi.edu> wrote:

> 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.

Sorry, should be http://my.opera.com/chaals/blog/excesskey

cheers

> 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
>>
>>
>
>
>


-- 
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

Received on Thursday, 2 December 2010 16:10:16 UTC