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Re: Access keys

for

From: Rich Pedley
Date: Jun 25, 2007 2:50AM

On 25/06/2007 00:06, tedd wrote:
> At 3:14 PM -0700 6/24/07, John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility
> Program wrote:
>> If you really must include accesskeys on your site, a number of
>> user-controllable solutions have emerged, my favorite being the one
>> developed by Gez Lemon: User-Defined Access Keys -
> http://juicystudio.com/article/user-defined-accesskeys.php

> Thanks for the links, all good reads. And, I'm not required to do
> anything regarding links -- I'm just looking to make the "right"
> choice.

To me the right choice is either to not include them, or allow
functionality to allow the user to set their own.

> While the last link is interesting, it seems a bit on an overkill for
> accessibility -- how many users are going to take the time to set-up
> access keys for a single site?

probably more than you think - but only for sites they wish to
revisit. That way they can set the same access key on different sites
and not be forced to try and figure out what key does what on what site.

Until access keys become settable by the user they are effectively
useless, how many different sites do you visit? Could you remember x
number of different access key sets? I can't even remember keyboard
access for the programs I use day to day, let alone websites I visit.
You may say that this is a case for standardising access keys, that
may be so, but unless everyone can agree to use the same set, it
becomes just as unusable.

> Too bad an universal cookie could not be set-up to carry the user's
> defaults across different web sites that are compliant to the
> technique. Something like a client-side sniffer that would detect if
> the technique was present on the newly accessed site and then
> initialize a procedure to provide cookie data to it.
>
> Food for thought.

Sorry but I wouldn't want that to be made available, being able to
read cross site cookies is surely a huge security issue.

Rich