[whatwg] Accesskey in Web Forms 2

[Laurens Holst]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> Yeah, that makes sense. So we're saying access keys should be completed 
> deprecated in HTML?

My vote would be in favour of that. Accesskeys are never useful and only
annoying. On some sites pressing ALT+S for my RSS reader (Sage) will
focus my cursor on the search field. Yet on other sites where I would
like easy access to the search field, no access key is set. You never
know which keys are assigned to where, there is no standard which says
's' has to be assigned to a search field, and I yet have to see the
first site where accesskeys are visually indicated. The fact that user
agents don't give any feedback on this doesn't help either. The argument
that shortcuts you set yourself are more likely to be remembered is also
a very sensible one.

I also think that in most cases the autofocus attribute would be
sufficient for the web author's needs. On the other hand, I don't know
what the accessibility impact of depracating this is. I guess the
question is whether anyone ever actually uses them accesskeys.

On the other hand it would be useful to be able to manually set a
shortcut key for a certain field on a certain page, for example a search
field I often use. But that would be strictly an UA thing. Nice idea for
a Firefox extension, maybe I'll look into that.


> People want to be able to do stuff with the keyboard, e.g. GMail wants to 
> be able to implement Pine-like keys. Clearly, that won't work across all 
> devices. Just as clearly, we can't rely on users to set up all these 
> keybindings themselves. Unfortunately I just don't see any other way to do 
> it which would not have flaws.

You can always do it with Javascript... GMail is probably doing that anyway.


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!