Re: Future of accesskey in DHTML based Widgets

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:38:18 -0000, John Foliot - Stanford Online  
Accessibility Program <jfoliot@stanford.edu> wrote:

> Schnabel, Stefan wrote:
>> In
>> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/
>> accesskey attribute is missing. I assume intentionally because of
>> browser issues (different implementations etc.).

Well, that's a draft - it doesn't have consensus in general and in  
particular there is not apparent consensus that accesskey should be  
dropped. Personally I ahve written a proposal for the group, which I hope  
they get around to considering in due time. Effectively that would allow  
for accesskey as currently used in markup, but require the browsers to  
expose it (and allow them to remap things where the key that the author  
proposes isn't actually available).

...
>> I believe that accesskey attribute support in content is crucial for
>> ease of navigation of business applications in contemporary browsers,
>> even for people without AT.
>>
>> In addition, it will reduce the amount of JS coding for developers of
>> widget toolkits.

These are pretty much in line with my opinions. I am hoping that instead  
of building complex javascript-based keymaping systems we can use  
accesskey to greatly simplify the tasks of making things keyboard  
accessible and letting users keep using their user interfaces.

...
> The key is that the browsers *MUST* allow end users to re-map "hot keys"  
> to match the needs of individual users; anything short of that introduces
> usability and accessibility issues that have already been well  
> documented.
...
> Given that HTML5 is being driven (force fed?) by the major browser
> developers, I believe that the responsibility rests with them to revisit
> accesskey and continue to support it's intent, but correctly this time
> (please).

Well, I am not sure that we are force-feeding the document, and browser  
makers are one set of stakeholders among several (content developers,  
producers of authoring tools, people who write educational stuff that  
others use are all important too) but yes, this is on the radar.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals   Try Opera 9.5: http://snapshot.opera.com

Received on Wednesday, 19 March 2008 23:19:46 UTC