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

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From: Robert Fentress
Date: Oct 30, 2015 6:20AM

_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
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