With apologies for cross posting. Dear Friends,
For the many that know me, you will know that a post to any of the lists I subscribe to on the topic of ACCESSKEY will automatically receive a response from me. I think by now my position is abundantly clear on this topic. When I first heard that XHTML 2 was deprecating ACCESSKEY in favor of the ACCESS element and the ROLE attribute, my initial reaction was, "Finally, they will get this right and a predictable, useful, stable means will finally emerge to provide keyboard navigation to those that can truly benefit from it". For while I have continually decried the mess and potential for harm that ACCESSKEY presented, I have always supported and advocated for a better way, and we publicly applauded the W3C for "getting it" too (Aug. 14, 2004 - http://www.wats.ca/articles/thefutureofaccesskeys/66). Along the way however, the ACCESS element has been shackled with the "KEY" attribute, allowing the possibility for the content author to dictate a specific key binding to one or more of the access points, in effect, I believe, replicating and perpetuating many of the most serious issues with ACCESSKEY: keystroke conflicts, little or no conflict resolution, internationalization issues, lack of an existing or persistent standard, etc. And so I have asked the Editors of the XHTML 2 Draft Recommendation to remove the KEY attribute from the specification. The full text of my request is published on the WATS.ca website: http://www.wats.ca/articles/xhtmlroleaccessmodulestillflawed/80 I ask that you take the five minutes required to review my request, and if you believe, as I do, that the KEY attribute has no place in XHTML 2, then I urge you to say so to the Draft Editors at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Remember, "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, AND THE PUBLIC work together to develop Web standards." (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/) Thank you. JF -- John Foliot [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web Accessibility Specialist / Co-founder of WATS.ca Web Accessibility Testing and Services http://www.wats.ca Phone: 1-613-482-7053 ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
