Yesterday, me and Arthur (are you mailing our hosting provider already, or shall I do it for you?) had a meeting with Eric Velleman. Some of the details were posted at Accessify.com, most of the details will never be posted, but there was one technical point that was fairly interesting.
More specifically, the ACCESSKEY and TABINDEX attributes. As far as Eric is concerned, those are useless for blind people. He said that he never saw someone who was using them. I must say that I'm quite happy with that, since I hardly add any on my sites (only some access keys Mark Pilgrim promoted for popular sections, using numbers) and I think both attributes are too platform specific, not only in name, but in practice as well. Not every input device has as much characters as a computer does for example.
Useless for blind people maybe, but not for people without a mouse!
Well, I personally consider tabindex one of the most useful user features around. Especially for login pages or the like. I've never seen much use for accesskey though, and agree with the notion that it's far too platform specific.
Useless for blind people maybe, but not for people without a mouse!
Type-ahead-find is all you need, it's in Mozilla based browsers.
Well, I personally consider tabindex one of the most useful user features around.
- I agree.
Of course is de TABINDEX a useful attribute! How annoying would it be, when their was no solution to ignore a link near a form element (like a INPUT)?
Relating to accesskey and tabindex but mainly thinking of people whom have difficulty with reading visual screen data due to blindness is rather narrowly focused.
You are more likely to run into a dyslexic individual - like myself - or someone with a different disability than you are you are a person whom is registered blind.
Admittedly the accesskey has its limitations and implementation drawbacks but you will have undoubted received a bias answer, even though it maybe generally true for the test group in question.
As you can see I have left my unedited post above; hence the erroneous repetitive "you are you are" instead of "you are a person" which proves a certain point (Anne: fixed).
There was no pressing need to fix my error in that case as it nicely illustrated a point but either way no harm was done (because it still demonstrates the "real-life" hindrance of a common disability).