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RE: accesskey assignments (now more 508)

for

From: John Foliot - bytown internet
Date: Dec 20, 2002 5:20AM


> On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 07:28:08AM -0500, Mark Rew wrote:
> > Anything that reduces the amount of navigation links I have to
> listen to with
> > my screen reader is appreciated. The question comes down to
> policy. Does the
> > standards that the Canadian Government are using allow for accesskeys?
>
> Yes. But (there's always a but) some pages that I have found in the
> official Canadian documentation (which is very hard to follow)
> advocate skip
> to links as The New Way To Do It. So we have a mix of both. :)
>

To clarify what the GoC policy now advocates is this: Provide "skip nav"
links on each page but to abandon the use of accesskeys. This is a direct
reversal of an earlier recommendation which advocated the use of three
accesskeys; Alt 1, Alt 2, and Alt M. It was subsequently pointed out that
these keystroke combinations were previously "reserved" for some adaptive
technologies. See: http://www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/clf-upe/6/skip_e.asp

Note that this reversal of recommnedation was only posted at the beginning
of December 2002, and so most GoC sites who bothered to read the policy
recomendations prior to that may not yet be aware of the change; as such
many sites may include the earlier, now deprecated, recommendation of the
three accesskeys noted.

JF



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