[whatwg] Drag and drop - keyboard support

[Remy Sharp]

Hi,

I've been running quite a few tests with the Drag and Drop API, and  
more recently I was looking at creating an accessible demo of DnD.

Plugging ARIA support wasn't a problem, but keyboard support was a no  
goer.

I tried triggering the dragstart event from the keyboard - which was  
fine, except that I couldn't get the dataTransfer object in there (it  
was null), so it meant the whole drag operation couldn't be triggered  
from the keyboard.

Unless I'm missing something, keyboard accessibility has been  
overlooked for DnD.

It's been raised once before, and I agree with some of the points  
raised in the url below, but I *can* get around them with scripting,  
whereas keyboard support flat out doesn't work.

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-July/020981.html

I'd like to know whether this is being considered anywhere?

I wondered if a copy and paste operation via the keyboard could be  
used to solve the keyboard DnD issue - in that coping on the :active  
element would trigger the dragstart event, and pasting from the  
keyboard could trigger the drop event on the current active element  
(that the user would tab to) (this idea was entirely inspired by  
Aron's post).

Is this a viable option?

Cheers,

Remy Sharp
Left Logic