Thank you for pointing out that recent versions of FireFox allow one to change the quite stupid default of having "access" keys conflict with the "menu" access navigation (Alt) that I use very frequently (Win32). I find it funny (in a sad way) that these "ui" settings have such an impressively bad UI (you have to read a separate document to find that the cryptic integer values can be looked up on yet another page where they are in hex so you have to convert the hex to decimal and then type it in).
My personal CSS puts red striped borders around "access key" navigation items just so I'm likely to notice them since they mostly serve to trip up my normal keyboard navigation techniques (so I'm certainly not a fan of their use so far).
I wish I knew a similar trick for IE as I still use IE for PerlMonks even though I use FireFox for most other surfing (IE has key features that make it much nicer for surfing PerlMonks for me than FF, though FF 3 finally caught up on soft hyphen support after a decade of IE following the standard so that is one less key PerlMonks feature once FF 3 stabilizes).
I don't see how your suggested navigation features fit PerlMonks. What is "next post"? You must be navigating via some more specific scheme that you don't explain for "next post" to make sense in your mind. There is no general concept of "next post" at PerlMonks so offering such a navigation option so prominently would most likely just confuse a large fraction of monks who don't or just currently aren't reading PerlMonks in the manner you are assuming.
"Vote ++"? Most places at PerlMonks present more than one node to vote on so a "Vote ++" navigation doesn't make much sense to me.
Perhaps you are thinking of scrolling within a thread, but I don't think access keys can be used that way (without doing a lot of JavaScript...).
For navigating between voting buttons, I've found that several browsers already have decent keyboard navigation for that. The voting buttons are often "adjacent" form elements so "go to next form input control" (etc.) often works well for selecting vote buttons.
I have used Opera and it does define some nice keyboard navigation shortcuts. So I encourage you to try it. You can also configure FireFox to "search when you type" which makes it fast to jump to navigation links via a keyboard.
So, your suggestions for navigation keys reinforces my impression that for them to be useful, people need to be able to customize them (there are only so many keys and there are lots of ways to navigate PerlMonks).
I also think that, with browser defaults mostly stupid with regard to access keys, it is best to have few if any access keys by default (such as only numeric ones, as Corion mentioned). Users who have made the effort to change the stupid defaults should be allowed to make the effort to define where they want access keys (I am disappointed that this isn't just natively supported in browsers -- part of the point of browsers and HTML was supposed to be to give the client control over presentation and navigation, despite so many web "designers" seemingly thinking nearly the opposite these days).
Perhaps the best next step would be to look for places where you want an accesss key and see if the HTML makes it easy or hard to use JavaScript to attach such for your own use. Suggesting specific things like adding a specific id="..." to a specific navigation point would allow such customization to become easier.
- tye
In reply to Re^3: Better keyboard-driven navigation, any? (thanks)
by tye
in thread Better keyboard-driven navigation, any?
by blazar
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