[whatwg] Accesskey in Web Forms 2

[Matthew Raymond]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Jul 2004, Jim Ley wrote:
>>On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 14:14:30 +0300, Kai Hendry <hendry at cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:
>>>1) Users can not easily tell what the accesskeys are.
>>
>>Their UA should do a better job of informing them.
> 
> Agreed; WA1 will probably give some way of automatically indicating access 
> keys. (I haven't really looked at this yet, hence the empty section.)

    I'm pretty sure the HTML 4.01 specification suggests a visual 
indicator for access keys, like underlining the character in the label. 
I think this is more a failure on the part of UA vendors to implement it.

>>>2) Accesskeys can conflict with the UA binds.
>>
>>Their UA should do a better job of picking a key combination to
>>activate them that doesn't interfere with their default UA binds.
>>
>>There's lots of possible modifier keys available to a UA - why override ALT.
> 
> Unfortunately there really aren't that many modifiers available, and ALT 
> is (on Windows) the standard for this kind of thing.

    How about a toggle of some kind to temporarily deactivate UA 
bindings, or some other kind of mechanism that allows people to 
temporarily use the access keys in a more direct manner? We could call 
it "access key mode".

>>Yes AccessKey isn't that well specified, but I think it can be fixed 
>>rather than completely removed.
> 
> Do you have any concrete suggestions? I've been looking at the feedback 
> the CSS group got on key-equivalent (which was removed from CSS3UI due to 
> the number of problems it had) and I'm not sure I see a good solution that 
> scales cross-platform and cross-device.

    See the above suggestion. I'll continue to work on alternatives.