[whatwg] On accessibility

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Jun 14, 2006, at 9:47 PM, Alexey Feldgendler wrote:
>
> On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 08:09:43 +0700, Lachlan Hunt 
> <lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> wrote:
>>
>> Accesskey implementations need to be seriously improved if they are 
>> to be retained.  There's significant evidence to show that there are 
>> very few, if any, safe keys available which don't clash with existing 
>> shortcut keys in browsers.
>
> What Opera does makes sense. Maybe it should be standardized.
> ...

What Opera does is indeed very cool, but it's quite possible that 
another browser could come up with something even cooler. And in this 
area there is very little benefit from interoperability, so I don't see 
any point in standardizing it. It would be like standardizing on vi. 
(Or emacs.)

(There is actually *harm* from interoperability for accesskey=, from 
Web authors cluttering pages with instructions on how to use access 
keys because they're so non-obvious -- instructions that may be 
incorrect for some platforms, depending on how they're worded, and that 
are irrelevant for non-interactive UAs like Google.)

-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/