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Re: Accesskeys (again??) (was RE: Physically Challenged Web Page Access)

for

From: John Foliot - WATS.ca
Date: May 4, 2005 2:35PM

Christian Heilmann wrote:

>>
>> Hence you _can_ do. Granted, I forgot to mention the pitfalls, but
>> that is because I am sick of repeating them. I work a lot with local
>> government sites here in the UK and accesskeys are a _mandatory
>> element_ for them to be deemed accessible by their own standards (and
>> get a certification - which means nothing but they need it).


Right, but that is a Government of UK "guideline"; which is, sadly, flawed.
To state that it is a "Standard" (such that it is universally agreed to and
supported) is just plain wrong. I personally lobbied the Gov. of Canada to
remove accesskeys from their published standards in 2001 and was successful
in getting them to do so
(www.cio-dpi.gc.ca/cioscripts/help/specs_e.asp?who=/clf-nsi/#Skip - "A
conflict has been identified between Access keys previously recommended for
use on Government of Canada sites and the proprietary assignment of Access
keys in commercially available software, therefore Access keys are not being
used."). If UK developers agree that their standard is flawed, it's up to
them to go to their government and say so.


>>
>>
>> To the last article: One reader of my article on LINKs
>> (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynanav/) pointed out that if can
>> be dangerous to overdo them as well, as they do get rendered as a list
>> of links at the beginning of the document, and there is no way to
>> offer a skip over them.


Yes, they do appear at the top of a document in browsers such as Lynx.
However, there is indeed a way to skip over them:

<link rel="home" href="index.php" title="Home" />
<link rel="bookmark" title="Page Content" href="#content" />
<link rel="bookmark" title="Site Navigation" href="#navcontainer" />


A recent discussion thread at the W3C-WAI Interest Group list discussed this
very issue.
(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2005AprJun/thread.html -
"Skip links ARE a markup problem (was RE: Skip links should be a markup
problem)"



>>
>> All we can do is try to do the right thing, one browser or another UA
>> will annoy us :-)


Developing for specific browsers or UAs is a fools task - develop to
standards and let the tools work to the same standards.

JF
--
John Foliot <EMAIL REMOVED>
Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca
Web Accessibility Testing and Services
http://www.wats.ca
Phone: 1-613-267-1983 / 1-866-932-4878 (North America)