Re: agreement: user disposes; disagreement: author proposes [was: Re: When actions speak louder than words]

Jon:
> I think the author should have a convienent way of defining
> elements they want to have keyboard shortcuts.  Obviously
> users should be able to change or ignore these author
> requests.  But is does give the author an ability to say this
> is a fequently used or consistent feature within their website.

Charles:
Yep. I think that is generally recognised as the really useful and
important part of accesskey. As currentlly specified I think the rest is
broken, the question is how to fix it...

Me:
To some extent I agree that accesskey is useful in these situations, 
although it depends on the frequency with which someone uses an interface. 
For most websites accesskey used as an accelerator is highly overrated, and 
frankly a waste of time.  With most web sites, users use them that 
infrequently, maybe even only once, that they never encounter the accesskey 
information enough to commit it to long term memory.  This means that the 
next time they visit that site they have to rediscover the accesskey 
information in order to use it, which for some users, such as screen reader 
users, means moving the caret to the link and thereby defeating the shortcut 
nature of accesskeys.

The one area where I do think accesskeys have some use, is in situations 
where users invoke the same functionality frequently.  This will give them 
the level of exposure to the association between functionality and accesskey 
that is necessary for transfer of that association to long term memory 
through rote rehearsal.  Typical useful scenarios would be a web app that 
someone uses daily, a web site on which they invoke the same functionality 
every day or so, etc.

One thought, is that given my presumption that accesskey is intended to 
reduce the number of physical key presses involved with an interaction, and 
that in most scenarios it fails to do this for some users, might it not be 
better to look for an alternative that works in all scenarios?  This would 
not only bypass the technical issue of conflicts, but also offer the user a 
better experience.

Will

Received on Monday, 2 January 2006 17:44:33 UTC