/Access all areas/ Web-fundi.com
18/10/2006 | Filed under Develop > Access all areas
The Disability Discrimation Act places obligations for people to provide an accessible service. Nomensa’s Alastair Campbell analyses www.web-fundi.com
We’re taking a trip to the Southern Hemisphere this month. One of our .net forum regulars, jakester13, sent in his site (www.web-fundi.com), the portfolio site for his web business in Nairobi, Kenya.
The site gets plenty of things right: the separation of content and presentation using CSS, valid HTML, and good alternative text for images. There are a couple of issues present that we’ve covered in previous articles: fixed font size and layout. This time, we’ll tackle ‘access keys’.
Access keys are designed to provide keyboard shortcuts for items such as links and form controls by applying the accesskey attribute. The site uses them extensively for each of the main navigation options, and some others, too. For example, you can get to the homepage from anywhere on the site by pressing Alt+H (and then Enter, in Internet Explorer). This follows the accessibility guideline, ‘Provide keyboard shortcuts to important links’. However, since the guidelines were written in 1999, browsers have implemented access keys in a way that can actually make them harmful to use by the target audience. The popular browsers actually enable site authors to override browser-functions, which wasn’t intended. By using keys such as H, the user can’t then open the ‘help’ option via the keyboard. Other clashes include ‘settings’, and the ‘window’ and ‘view’ menus. If you investigate which keys are left without clashes across various access technologies, you find the set of: x z ` = ( [ ] \ :
I’ve also found that very few of the target audience knows about access keys or know what to do with them. So what should a web developer do? There are several options, the first of which is simply to not use them. Spend that time on ‘skip links’ instead, which are useful (see p70 for skip link tutorial). The only viable way of implementing access keys is to make them a user preference, so the user can select their own. This way, clashes become irrelevant, as the user sets which keys are used. (Accessify has implemented this well: http://accessify.com/preferences/accesskeys.)
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Comments
Pete / 18/10/2006 / 14:45
Remarkably similar, yet somehow less informative, to something I've read before (a larger case study with corroborative evidence), I think on Digital-Web.
Good that some attention has been drawn to the topic though.
Alastair Campbell / 25/10/2006 / 19:16 / http://www.nomensa.com
Hi Pete, it's quite a short word limit (due to the paper magazine), so it's difficult to expand on things. Anyway, the message still hasn't gotten through yet, many sites and even other articles still use accesskeys badly, so we'll keep plugging away...
Adam Messinger / 26/10/2006 / 04:39 / http://www.zenscope.com/
What about numeric accesskeys? Are there any / many known keybinding collisions for those?
Adrian Lee / 02/11/2006 / 11:31 / http://www.camaban.co.uk
You still have all the problems of people remembering what the accesskey combinations for your site are Adam.
And as I understand it, the people they are most use to, have alternatives they use across all sites anyway.
Personally I don't use accesskeys at all.
Alastair Campbell / 15/11/2006 / 11:40 / http://www.nomensa.com
Hi Adam,
Yes, numeric keys clash with Firefox 2:
http://juicystudio.com/article/firefox2-accesskeys.php
If you do use them, they really have to be user-set. There is some upcoming work from the W3C that will replace the intended fucntionality of accesskeys in a way that doesn't have these problems, but it will be a while before that is generally usable.
