[whatwg] Accesskey in Web Forms 2

[Derek Featherstone]

On Wednesday, November 10, 2004 10:13 AM, Matthew Thomas wrote:

> Non-conflicting keyboard shortcuts could be created by the user with
> the help of the UA (as in my original example), or by the UA with the
> help of the user (as in my example above). What accesskey= does,
> however, is to place the responsibility of creating shortcuts on the
> author -- *the only party* involved who can't possibly know enough to
> do a decent job of it. 

That's exactly what I've been saying all along, though nobody ever seems to
agree with me. The concept of keystroke access is what needs to be
preserved. The concept of author defined keystrokes needs to be coupled with
user defined - the author needs to have sole responsibility for that
decision to be removed from their realm.

I still like the XHTML 2 proposal of the access attribute:

For single page:
1. Authors define key access points for items in their documents (their
search form, individual form fields, other forms, whatever)
2. Authors provide a list of keystrokes as suggestions for keys that bind to
those access points (an XML file perhaps?)
3. User Agents provide the ability for a power user to accept those keys or
override them and store that preference. This could be on a site by site
basis for situations where you are doing data entry on a specific
application over and over. This would account for conflict, and for user
preference -- some users may choose different keystrokes based on their
dominant hand, for example.

For all pages/sites
1. Authors define key access points across *all* sites should be defined
that mimic or bind to <link rel="" /> elements and their defined values -
both currently existing and expanded: home, search, help, up, next, prev,
privacy, accessibility, copyright, etc...
2. Authors provide a suggested list of keystrokes for those access points
3. User agents provide the ability for the user to override any author
defined key binding to those access points. If I as a user have a keystroke
defined for "home" as Ctrl + Shift + H, then the user agent respects it and
overrides what the author specified.

In both cases, the UA has to help the user clearly identify the keystrokes.

In this scenario, the authors help those that won't define their own, and
power users can override anything they want on a page by page basis, as well
as apply them to all sites they visit where those access points are defined?

Isn't this the utopia that we all want?

Best regards,
Derek.
-- 
Derek Featherstone     feather at wats.ca
phone: 613.599.9784;   toll-free: 1.866.932.4878 (North America)
Web Accessibility:  http://www.wats.ca
Personal: http://www.boxofchocolates.ca