Creating an easy Keyboard Navigation Key

Informing visitors of advanced accessbility features...

[JAB Creations]

So we've worked on Power Keys [webmasterworld.com] and that was a lot of fun. I've worked on mastering keyboard navigation on a position and layers dependent design that now works flawlessly (at least in browsers that support tabindex, and looks nice in Gecko browsers as they are the only browsers that fully support focus).

However while I might know about all these nifty features (press any key other then tab to open second and third level menu items in example) my visitors most likely will not!

Now obviously it doesn't take a study to know that the vast majority of users are using their mouse for navigation while they surf. However I would like to determine if a user prefers or simply just is using their keyboard to navigate (pressing the tab key a lot). In that circumstance I'd like to execute a completely separate script (call a different function) that would simply notify my visitors of some of the accessibility enhancements I've made. It wouldn't be hard for most people to understand what I'm talking about...it's just a matter of making sure that they don't go too far in to using the keyboard without any notification that they may become frustrated.

Before we dive in to code I want to ask others a basic though key question...how many times on a single page do you think you or most people may press TAB to distinguish between just tabbing between a username and password field in one example to outright navigating the entire page?

I would imagine the code would simply count the tab key presses...and based on a variable (the desired count where I'm sure we may all have specific disagreements though general agreements) execute a function (handled by some other script).

- John

[Drag_Racer]

I think your just having fun...

Trying to get people to change habits is tough and may hurt you in the long run. When I am browsing I have certain habits and if I get to a page and I have to change those habits it really frustrates me.

Buy, to answer you Q, I wouldn't tab more than a couple of times.

[lavazza]

I'm an able-bodied and relatively heavy user of browsers who consciously tries, when writing for the web, to accommodate the widest variety of users, so I'm interested in your ideas

However...

I use 2 browsers and each has it's own set of keyboard features that appeal to me as a user

Opera has a whole bunch of them:
[opera.com...]

In Firefox the keyboard is simply MY search tool... when I start typing, FF immediately starts searching for and highlighting corresponding text

I would be seriously annoyed if any site tried to hijack this functionality, which for me as a user is now indispensible

I only use IE to test my work for compatability - you have my unreserved assent to muck around as much as you like with that dinosaur ;)

==============

As for tabbing...

If there are input fields that I'm using, I'll tab/shift+tab between them

Other than that my tab key doesn't get used much for navigation around a page...

Instead I use PAGE DOWN, PAGE UP, HOME and END...
Cos they work...
Quickly and easily...
Just like they do in all the other apps that I use