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

for

From: Christian Heilmann
Date: May 4, 2005 2:46PM

>>> > 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" />


*doh* so easy, yet so daft of me not to think about that. Cheers for
setting m straight.


>> 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.


Err.... accesskey is a valid attribute in the standard, and the only
problem with it is that UAs have their own keyboard shortcuts which
make it quite a task to find ones that make sense. Therefore
developers following a standard do nothing wrong, the real world
implementation is where it fails.
That leaves us with the question who is wrong? The standard body,
assuming that UAs won't need all keyboard shortcuts or the UA
developers, implementing them?
I'd say both, as the accesskey attribute should have gotten a range of
valid values which would have been illegal for the UAs to use.

-- Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/