Re: Are we really still talking about Access Keys?

>   At the moment, accesskey is a way for an author to make a decision
>   regarding his/her content: THIS link is special, THAT link is not,
>   THIS one is definetly special. No UA can make such a choice, unless we
>   restrict content providers to an extreme subset of links.
> 

We could restrict them to a subset of links, but that doesn't make it useless.

New, Open, Save, Close, Copy, Cut, Paste, Bold, Italics, Underline,
Help, Beginning of Line, End of Line, Beginning of Document, End of
Document, Left Character, Right Character, Left Word, Right Word, Up
Line, Down Line (plus selection variant), Delete Character/Word
Forward/Backward, Next Field, Previous Field, Insert Line

These are some of the functions that have standard accelerator keys.
Most though are so standard we don't think about them, but you can
really tell when someone messes with them. Remember all keyboard
commands are accelerators keys. Just look at something like Visual
Studio 2005 to see to what extent you can change them.,

Introducing a new set of standard keys doesn't restrict use, it simply
adds to the list of keyboard shortcuts users are likely to remember.
Those accelerators I mentioned above are the subset of consistent
accelerators.

I'm personally of the mind that keyboard accelerators should only
apply to the most common set by default and then be added by the user
(suggestions are allowed). I can tell you that I'm almost entirely a
keyboard user and I still don't use keyboard accelerators outside the
norm. I simply use the menus because they are easy to discover.

What would really be useful is the creation of standard location and
command sets so that the application can remember usage so that in
every context that I move to my set of keyboard commands will work. If
they're domain specific it also allows for a saner environment and
subclassing.

More on this later as I think about it some more.

Orion Adrian

>   A serious implementation, however, could easily create any number of
>   ways for users to access the access keys. They just ... *don't*.
>

Received on Thursday, 2 June 2005 16:50:13 UTC