- From: jeff ganyard <jeff.ganyard@macspeech.com>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:21:24 -0700
- To: wai-xtech@w3.org
Greetings All, after much inquiry, I have come to understand this as the place to go to suggest something to help make web apps more accessible. My company produces a product call MacSpeech Dictate, amongst other things we try to make the Mac experience more accessible to our users, with a definite focus on speech as an input medium. A while back I was trying work out a solution for a user to help them access a particular web app, it really could have been any robust and well developed web application. I was unable to find any kind of standard way to provide access to commands. Since web apps exist within other apps, the traditional modifier keys aren't really available since they would more likely cause the browser to do something not the web app. And as a logical result this web app provides keyboard shortcuts that consist of single unmodified keys. This web app provided a link to a help page with a list of the keys and the descriptions of what actions those commands execute. And so Iw as able to scrape that page and manually create commands for that user. A solution that obviously isn't scalable. So I started thinking about approaches.. and it seems that any web app developer that is using key shortcuts would have a list readily available or at worst it could be reasonably easy to produce. So why not publish them in a file in some useful machine readable format? Then let other developers and solution providers have an easy way to access this simple but standard format. Put the file at the site root, and think of it like a robots.txt or even a favicon.ico file, it's just part of the process of building a complete offering. Thinking on it in terms of implementation, I have thought about having them available as a REL link but at least at this point, for efficiency, I would prefer to grab this file on a per domain basis not a per URI basis. So the file should include some patterns for URL matching to determine when a given collection of keys would be functional/available/enabled. Below is a suggested format. Though in reality, the format is not the important aspect, not nearly as much as the adoption of *some* format. It is included to help get the ball started rolling... Please comment, append, edit, slash, embrace the suggestion as you feel appropriate. thanks for your time, Jeff Ganyard <dict> <key>location</key> <dict> <key>URL</key> <string>pattern</string> <key>keystrokes</key> <dict> <key>A</key> <dict> <key>a</key> <string>A key</string> <key>description</key> <dict> <key>en</key> <string>A key</string> <key>fr</key> <string>A clef</string> </dict> </dict> <key>B</key> <dict> <key>b</key> <string>B key</string> <key>description</key> <dict> <key>en</key> <string>B key</string> <key>fr</key> <string>B clef</string> </dict> </dict> </dict> </dict> </dict>
Received on Tuesday, 16 June 2009 05:39:19 UTC