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I am quite new to this game and I have not bothered about this so far but I will have to do so sooner or later. Can anyone offer any advice on this? Are there any good tutorial sites available out there? What are the best ways of enabling access keys?
I use them all the time for accessibility of websites and for both accessibility and usability on thin-client (browser based UI) applications.
W3C Spec: [w3.org...]
WAI WCAG: [w3.org...]
MSDN: [msdn.microsoft.com...]
WAI: Web Accessibility Initiative.
WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
HTH
Here's a thread with a list of the numerical standard assignments that has been adopted worldwide (they avoid clash and also work with phones and WebTV remotes, etc):
[webmasterworld.com...]
I love them myself- It's so much quicker than having to reach for my mouse and then scroll up and down to find the link you need. If the site has them, I just know that Alt+1 always takes me to the homepage and 4 focuses on the Search, etc. Check out game.net and Virgin radio.
I'm just a bit miffed as to why they were never implemented on HERE. It would be a great working example.
CSS and subset captioning markup languages of XML like SMIL, SALT and MAGpie are the drivers of accessibility.
enter ACCESSIBILITY into google and it will return a mind-boggling number of relevant and value sites for an overwhelming amount of information on the subject. if google returns too many hits enter ACCESSIBILITY+UK, as your country is the world leader on accessibility. I believe you even have a federal mandate for accessibility compliance for public web sites by 2006, motivating the industry to comply by law? Seems I read that in a UK industry trade magazine somewhere...
for advanced-level information, enter ACCESSIBILITY+BLOG into google. Since experts in any field seem to maintain serious blogs, basic information is filtered out and the most innovative advanced information remains!
hope this helps.
kat
Handy if you know they are there - but if you provide an accessibility/lowbandwidth link after the logo on every site regular users soon find them.
May seem a bit over the top but I have had some tremendous feedback after making our sites more accessibile through access keys and alike.
Until there's (yet another!) "standardisation" of these keys I would avoid them personally.
I tend to use tabindex if necessary and sprinkle "skip-to" anchors at pertinent locations.
Well done for gettin "on-board" BTW. I'm sure you'll find yourself entering a whole new level of understanding and usability.
Anyway, about the conflict thing- that's not a problem in practice. Macs and Linux operating systems don't use Alt in the same way as Windows, so that's those completely clear.
And on Windows, Opera and a few other browsers don't use Alt for the accesskey activation, so there's not really any conflict there either. For Win IE/Moz/Firefox, you can still be safe: Apart from a handful of letters, the use of numbers doesn't interfere with any menu (and is now the well established worldwide standard, in any case, since nobody else has proposed anything contradictory). Unless some clueless Microsoft browser programmer has decided to use Alt+1 for the File menu in IE8!
Anyway, from their chart it looks as though about half of the characters are wiped out in any one case... Leaving the other half free to use (or maybe a little less if you consider alternate languages)
But I guess that's a problem for browser manufacturers to work around. At the end of the day they should adhere to the standards, and since accesskeys have been around since about 1997, there really isn't any excuse for them not to have alternative ways to handle this (the spec doesn't say it has to be alt, you can use whatever you want). We have enough modifier keys on the keyboard, especially if you include combinations. It's only when accesskeys become widespread that they will be forced to listen, and until then they will do their own thing regardless of any incompatibilities or conflicts...
Anyway, pressing Alt+letter for a menu is only an accellerator, and is entirely optional. So conflicts don't usually matter. Nothing disastrous can happen. There are dozens of other ways to get the Edit menu to drop down. Aside from a mouse, an example of this is to press and release Alt, and then press E. Another example known to most keyboard users is F10, which activates the menubar on pretty much all software released in the last 15 years. You can then use cursor keys to access any item on any menu...
And according to that chart, the numbers are only reserved with Window Eyes+IE5.5 (which apparently comes 2nd in market share after Jaws, and before HPR, Supernova and Hal), and it's my understanding that any software of this nature is much more user-forgiving, and much more easily customized than an off-the-shelf-browser. So again, no problem.
Always provide an Access Key map instructing users how to utilize the Access Keys and which keys perform which function.
My biggest problem has been adhering to the standards which are not really standards as of yet. I use both numeric and alpha Access Keys and according to the above resources, I am sidestepping the standards.
So again, no problem
R1chard, you threw up enough anomalies in your post alone to question their use ;)
Fact is, AFAIC anyway, is that there are too many variables at play to make them worthwhile bothering about - It's about usability, not confusion. Until there are nominated key-combo's - which I seriously doubt will ever happen - then alternative navigation aids are called for.
Not only that, but if every site has different accesskey combo's - which they invariably have - then, again, I pity the user that has to learn them... sad, but true.
[archivist.incutio.com...]
[clagnut.com...]
I feel comfortable using:
0-4, 6, 7
Q, Z, X
(imho you could use a lot more letters since HomePage Reader generally seems to ignore accesskeys, as per [wats.ca...] )
Except to match the UK Government Shortcuts, the above ought to be sufficient!
*It sure beats avoiding using them altogether, right?*
So here's a pretty good minimum accesskey set:
0: Accessibility Statement (with access key info)
1: Home
2: Skip navigation
3: Site Map
4: Search
Q: First form field on any page
For more info on Accesskeys you could also read from Joe Clark's "Building Accessible Websites":
[joeclark.org...]
Hope that helps! Accesskeys can be useful even to those who wouldn't depend on them, once you figure out how to get them to display in Mozilla and Opera (with user style sheets).
Until there are nominated key-combo's - which I seriously doubt will ever happen - then alternative navigation aids are called for.
Huh? There are well-documented standards that have been im place for several years. Everybody keeps saying "there aren't any key standards", when what they actually mean is "I'm not using a standard because I don't know there is one". And the conflict thing is a complete red herring that doesn't affect anybody. In short, there aren't any anomalies.
if every site has different accesskey combo's - which they invariably have - then, again, I pity the user that has to learn them... sad, but true.
The point is that with the universal standard, the user doesn't need to learn anything. It's intuative, and it stands to reason that a website should be no different to a word processor or anything else (see Ctrl+C to copy consistantly in every application, or F1 for help in every application). Websites are no different. If 1 is always Home, and I can rely on it always being home, then I don't know what the problem is. For the main site-wide navigation, no variables come into play (obviously it's different on page-specific details, but I'm talking universal stuff here).
It seems like a vicious circle that the standard isn't more widely adopted because nobody knows about it because it's not more widely adopted. If you ask me, all it would take would be a small handful of key sites to start using them, and everbody else would say "neat!" and copy them, and you'd get accesskeys on 100 million Tripod pages overnight. Just look at the instant spread of <blink> or bgproperties or a:hover! They all rapidly took off like wildfire in less than a few weeks because of the teenage factor.
I don't think I'm being too naive to think the same could happen here when somebody discovers that it's so much quicker to use the keyboard. People like us should be leading the way, not sitting back delaying things because we're lazy and don't want to find out about the standard. If pros don't step in first, then you might find that amatuers hijack the idea, and things become as different and unorganized as you suggest.
