Re: Looking for access to keyboard shortcuts for web apps

HI Jeff,

a much simpler way is to use accesskey attributes. This is not perfect,  
since some things cannot currently be triggered with accesskeys (and since  
some browsers use a modifier pattern for triggering accesskey that  
interferes with what the user expects to happen).

But the HTML5 spec for accesskeys is now getting pretty good, and  
hopefully the browsers who followed the HTML4 advice will switch and do it  
in a way that makes sense for users.

Then you have a pretty simple way to get shortcuts:

get the things that have an accesskey attribute, find out what the  
attribute is and the title/label/description of the thing that is  
triggered.

The complication is that the browser can remap the keys. So I will check  
and make sure that there is a way to fire the initial accesskey as listed  
in the attribute...

cheers

Chaals

On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:21:24 +0200, jeff ganyard  
<jeff.ganyard@macspeech.com> wrote:

> 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>
>
>



-- 
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 Tuesday, 16 June 2009 09:20:17 UTC