WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: JavaScript library for display and customization of keyboard shortcuts?

for

From: Brian Lovely
Date: Oct 30, 2015 6:35AM


Rob,

The Aegis project has keyboard shortcuts, but they are baked in. jQuery UI does not appear to fully support accessibility and keyboard shortcuts at this time (assuming date picker to be typical of all widgets). http://wiki.jqueryui.com/w/page/12137778/Datepicker <http://wiki.jqueryui.com/w/page/12137778/Datepicker>;


Brian Lovely
<EMAIL REMOVED>



> On Oct 30, 2015, at 8:20 AM, Robert Fentress < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> _mallory, you have expressed well my intent here. Screen reader users
> have a lot of great affordances, but straight-up keyboarders, not so much.
> On pages with lots of tab stops, this is a pain. Perhaps the keyboard
> shortcuts should be off by default to avoid conflicts with other AT, but I
> do think providing customizable hotkeys as an easily-enabled affordance
> could provide great value.
>
> Jennifer, thanks for the info. I had seen Marcy Sutton's slides, but
> didn't know there was a recording of her presentation, so that is helpful.
>
> Asa, thanks for the link to MouseTrap.
>
> Brian, I wonder if the accessibility enhancements in Aegis have since been
> folded into jQueryUI core. I thought they had, but I haven't really
> checked. Is there something in there that provides a customizable keyboard
> shortcut tool?
>
> Best,
> Rob
>
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 4:54 AM, _mallory < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 11:41:37AM -0700, Jennifer Sutton wrote:
>>> And my larger question would be, why is this idea under consideration?
>>>
>>> Aren't we getting into the territory of possible keyboard conflicts
>>> with screen reader and browser keyboard controls? And the issues of
>>> people having to learn something new that only applies to a
>>> particular site?
>>
>> I think such an idea could have merit for:
>>
>> 1. non-SR-using keyboarders (and other keyboard-oriented users via things
>> like switches, Dragon, whatever) who for example cannot navigate around
>> by aria-thingies and, at least without any AT, are at the mercy of the
>> Thousand Tabs of Death
>>
>> 2. and then actually only useful for sites that are large, often-
>> revisited sites/apps like Gmail. There are javascripted keyboard
>> shortcuts in Gmail but I still have a lot of trouble moving around
>> big sections so I dunno what I'm missing, and if this were a library
>> where the user could set their own keystrokes, what this could allow
>> is users who've already put time and effort learning another similar
>> app (let's say a very awesome mail client like mutt) could put their
>> investment to use on this other site. Again, it would only make sense
>> on things like news sites, mail apps, maybe stuff like Twitter-- the
>> kinds of sites that you notice often already have a bunch of javascripted
>> keyboard shortcuts hidden behind a "?" key already, because people
>> revisit them. I actually don't see it being useful for a shop, even
>> if people visit the shop often, it's not such a daily thing as mail or
>> news.
>>
>> I don't see anything like this necessarily being useful for SR-users
>> as they have a nice set of navigation keystrokes available to them,
>> and as you mention, they have more possibility for conflicts.
>>
>> What I'd much rather want to see is more basic keyboard stuff
>> integrated into browsers, such as possibly giving non-SR browser
>> users the ability to at least navigate via [aria] roles, or by
>> HTML type (like quick keys for Tables, Forms, etc). But since that's
>> never going to come, a steaming pile of JS on every large site/app
>> might be the distant-but-best-shot number 2.
>>
>> _mallory
>> >> >> >> >>
>
>
>
> --
> Robert Fentress
> Senior Accessibility Solutions Designer
> 540.231.1255
>
> Technology-enhanced Learning & Online Strategies
> Assistive Technologies
> 1180 Torgersen Hall
> 620 Drillfield Drive (0434)
> Blacksburg, Virginia 24061
> > > >