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Bug 11140 - Subject: Physical Keys and Gestures for "accesskey" attribute The use of ASCII/Unicode code points for key binding has numerous well-known drawbacks. There are vital physical keyboard keys with no Unicode representation. Even for the main alphabet keys sp
Summary: Subject: Physical Keys and Gestures for "accesskey" attribute The use of ASCI...
Status: CLOSED MOVED
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Charles McCathieNevile
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords: a11y, a11ytf, a11y_focus
Depends on:
Blocks: 10888 23613 23615
  Show dependency tree / graph
 
Reported: 2010-10-25 17:24 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2014-05-01 15:48 UTC (History)
12 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2010-10-25 17:24:22 UTC 
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#top

Comment:
Subject: Physical Keys and Gestures for "accesskey" attribute

The use of ASCII/Unicode code points for key binding has numerous well-known
drawbacks. There are vital physical keyboard keys with no Unicode
representation. Even for the main alphabet keys specifying a stabile physical
location based on ergonomic considerations, regardless of keyboard mapping,
may be desirable. Unicode keybinding is useful for mnemonic keys however.

So for "accesskey" there should be a complete set of keywords representing the
physical keyboard keys -- referenced based on the locations on U.S. standard
keyboards, with names like "jKey", "slashKey", "leftArrow", "capsLock". All
keys should be represented including alphabet keys, F-keys, modifier keys, cap
lock, etc., and there should be syntax for indicating simultaneous key presses
(e.g. Control + uparrow).

A set of "media" keys would also be highly desirable (e.g. keyboard
volume/mute keys bindable to controls of an HTML5 video interface) although
this may not be standardizable.

But keys are so 2009. We of course also now need keywords for swipe gestures,
e.g:

[a href="page_2.html" accesskey="rightArrow horizLeftwardSwipe"]Turn Page[/a].

Posted from: 75.36.155.97
Comment 1 Michael Cooper 2010-11-23 16:49:20 UTC 
Bug triage sub-team thinks this issue has accessibility implications and wants the HTML A11Y TF to review in context of the keyboard access work. Indicating that this bug blocks 10888 as we think resolution of this bug is important to the accessibility work.
Comment 2 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-01-01 08:14:36 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: Support for keywords to reference specific things, e.g. gestures or special keys (like F1), is something that is intentionally left open for a future version, but before we go there we really need more experience with the changes we've done so far.
Comment 3 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:02:14 UTC 
mass-moved component to LC1
Comment 4 Charles McCathieNevile 2012-11-20 23:53:14 UTC 
I agree with Hixie. 

I certainly don't think that mapping a US keyboard in words is a particularly good approach - it gets us closer to the problems seen in the use of javascript to create keyboard interfaces, and that strikes me as a net loss.

As for gestures, etc, the world is probably ready to research using them in the context of accesskeys - Opera and others have had ways of associating page actions to gestures for many years - but I don't think we are ready to try and standardise something for HTML.
Comment 5 Mark Sadecki 2013-10-23 20:07:38 UTC 
a11ytf decision to move to HTML.next:
http://www.w3.org/2013/10/17-html-a11y-minutes.html#item04

New bug:
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23615