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

for

From: _mallory
Date: Oct 30, 2015 2:54AM

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