Hi all, I have received a couple of questions off-list about how Fluid is handling keyboard mappings for our components, and thought I'd try to clarify our approach in the Reorderer and underlying framework.
Recently, Anastasia, Joseph, and Jonathan have been doing a lot of testing and analysis to come up with some good, screen reader-friendly default keyboard shortcuts for selecting and moving items with the Reorderer. We think really good defaults are important, but we also want to enable customizability. The Reorderer will support more than one keyboard mapping, and will allow alternatives to be injected at configuration time or dynamically in by a preferences editor. Michelle and I are currently sketching out some Fluid framework code that will provide a simple API for components to support customizable keyboard mappings. This will prevent developers from having to hardcode assumptions about keyboard controls, making components more future-proof and interoperable. This approach is in line with our general philosophy of allowing flexibility and customization for different contexts and user needs. With the help of Mike Elledge and Amy Chen at Oracle, we're also going to do some quick, targeted user research to learn more about how users of screen readers tend to accomplish tasks that are otherwise done using mouse-based drag and drop. This will help us to continue to refine our designs based on real feedback from users. Colin --- Colin Clark Technical Lead, Fluid Project Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto http://fluidproject.org _______________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list [email protected] http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
