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Accesskeyus interruptus: another real-world case

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From: Daniel Champion
Date: Feb 16, 2006 7:45AM

JF wrote:

>This is not a criticism of the Accessites web site, nor the people
>behind it (active and involved web accessibility proponents and
>advocates), but if developers of this level of activity in web
>accessibility are accidentally authoring these types of "errors", what
>hope do we have of mainstream, less informed developers "getting it"?

In this particular instance I have to hold my hands up and say "mea
culpa", since I set the defaults for Accessites. That said I was following
the oft-quoted UK government standards for accesskeys [1], in the
misguided belief that they were reasonably unobtrusive.

Clearly they don't cut it - any UK government site adhering to the
standard has the potential to cause problems, since "0" is the default
accesskey for accessing 'Access key details'.

For UK government web people like myself it now comes down to a decision
of which is the lesser of two evils - not adhering to the standard,
therefore denying those who use accesskeys easy access to the accesskey
details for a site (not to say incuring the penalty of a poor SiteMorse
report), or adhering to it and potentially incoveniencing users who
require to enter accented or other extended characters into forms?

Personally I've gone for the former - it's relatively easy to find
accesskey information without the default being set, while the potential
frustration of being whisked away from a partially completed form is
somewhat more problematic IMHO.

Dan

[1]
http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-government/resources/handbook/html/2-4.asp#2.4.4




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