Looking for access to keyboard shortcuts for web apps

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