More on Fluid's approach to keyboard bindings

[Colin Clark]

Allison,

On 23-Jan-09, at 6:07 PM, Allison Bloodworth wrote:

> Trying to make sense of the various resources I've found...
>
> I'm wondering if we should just be following the guidelines in the  
> DHTML Style Guide Working Group's document: http://dev.aol.com/dhtml_style_guide

The DHTML accessibility style guide is a good place to start. As  
you've heard me mention in the past, I don't always agree with their  
recommendations, but they've done a lot of work to try to assess  
existing (usually Windows-specific) key conventions. As we learned  
from the Reorderer, with a bit of design thinking we can often come up  
with more effective styles of keyboard navigation for a particular  
context.

Start with their recommendations, but think critically about them.

> I think there's also a bit of info on this topic here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/aria-practices/#aria_ex

The keyboard conventions from this ARIA Best Practices document are  
based on those from the Style Guide. These are a little out of date,  
so refer to the style guide.

Ultimately, the Style Guide is destined to be included as part of the  
ARIA Best Practices.

> And below is an email that Colin sent out about the Fluid approach  
> to keyboard bindings a while back.


All of our framework infrastructure supports configurable key  
bindings, and I think it's a useful option to provide users with in  
case of conflicts with assistive technologies. There are so many  
permutations and combinations that it's impossible to get every  
keyboard shortcut right. We try to pick the best defaults we can, and  
offer customizability where needed.

Colin

---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org