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Re: Maximum number of keystrokes (operations) to get to any item on a webpage?

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Dec 18, 2011 6:39AM

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 10:55 PM, Birkir R. Gunnarsson
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> All of this being said, has accessibility ever been framed or
> evaluated in terms of number of keystrokes needed to get to an element
> on a page?

Yes. The WCAG2 supporting documentation explains that this is an
advantage of headings:

http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/navigation-mechanisms-descriptive.html

See also:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2011Sep/0032.html

for a rationale of why WCAG does not go to include a precise metric
around the number of keystrokes.

Note also that different mechanisms implemented by different user
agents can radically change the number of keystrokes required, even in
the absence of semantic markup. For example, typeahead find and
spatial navigation can radically reduce the time taken to activate a
link.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis