On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:15:04 -0500, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Nathan Hamblen wrote:
> As far as the site goes, it should set accesskeys
that are the most
> useful to the most people, without too much regard for pre-release
> browsers on Linux with open accesskey bugs.
That would probably be very few access keys then. Do
more than a
handful of people actually use these access keys, and have any
significant number of people requested them? I'd wager there's more
Wikipedians who use Firefox on Linux than there are Wikipedians who use
alt + . to visit their user page.
The major use case for accesskeys is to help with accessibility for the
disabled. (They can be very helpful for users with screen readers and
users with motor disabilities in particular.) For more information, cf.
<http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_15_defining_keyboard_shortcuts.html>
It's also worth noting that accessibility concerns make including
accesskeys simultaneously more important *and* more difficult, because
they impose the extra concern of not colliding with keyboard shortcuts
defined by the browsing software (and packages like the JAWS screen reader
define quite a few). I was a bit alarmed to see that WikiPedia has been
colonizing alphabetic shortcut keys for its shortcuts; the best thing to
do to avoid collisions is to restrict accesskeys, insofar as possible, to
numbers 0-9 (= ALT+0, ALT+1, ...). Dive Into Accessibility covers some of
the common mappings that have been agreed on, and links to further
discussions.
HTH.
-C
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Charles Johnson <technophilia(a)radgeek.com>
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