RE: Accesskey: there are "techniques"?

I basically agree with Tom.

Bearing in mind the wide range of user agents (I have had two that support
accesskey for more than 3 years - iCab on a succession of Macs and my old
cellphone (which I still use) it isn't accurate to say there are 36 keys -
almost any unicode character is allowed, including sensible ones like arabic
or thai characters.

Maurizio is right - we have a problem with expectations of users (it isn't
helped by people saying "click alt + the key to activate", since that isn't
the method for quite a lot of user agents). But it isn't unsolvable, it just
needs to be better managed.

One thing to do is where applicable use the link element (or at least rel
attributes in links) - many browsers now support this, and it provides
consistency in the browser. In practice, it means that an Opera keyboard user
can press a aprticular key to go to the "next" page or "home page" for any
site that follows this piece of HTML 1 and above, while a mozilla user will
have different keys to press, but they change with the browser, not the page.
(iCab doesn't make them available from the keyboard I don't think, which is a
shame, since it was one of the first graphic browsers to make a big deal
out of them).

cheers

Chaals

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Tom Croucher wrote:

>
>Surely this is user agents issue rather than an accesskey issue. Opera
>uses an accesskey mode which turns off its default shortcuts while in
>that mode. Since you can toggle the mode on and off you know exactly
>what you are getting. It seems to me that developers shouldn't feel
>hamstrung by any implementation (however large the IE market slice is)
>of accesskeys in UAs, there are 36 keys to use and we should use them.
>On complex sites having an intuitive letter for the accesskeys can make
>a big difference.

Received on Friday, 26 September 2003 22:21:25 UTC