A presentation at Monkigras in in London, UK by Lorna Jane Mitchell
Tales of a Keyboard-Only User Lorna Mitchell, Nexmo
About Me (and my keyboard) @lornajane
Once Upon A Time
Spatial Navigation Opera had keyboard spatial navigation (past tense) A new W3C spatial navigation standard is in progress https://wicg.github.io/spatial-navigation/demo/ @lornajane
Vimium • https://vimium.github.io/ • “The Hacker’s Browser” • Plugin for Chrome and Firefox • Drive your browser from your keyboard @lornajane
Web Forms: The Good It’s absolutely possible to do it well! GDS are an excellent example and they publish their guidelines https://govuk-elements.herokuapp.com/form-elements/ @lornajane
Web Forms: The Bad • Sliders, date pickers, anything not-standard • “Helper” keyboard shortcuts, e.g. TypeForm @lornajane
As the product and company continues to mature, I am sure we will get to tackling accessibility as soon as we can. ~ TypeForm Support @lornajane
Dropdowns The “richer” the dropdown, the harder it is to use! • Beware onChange(), try onBlur() instead • Start with a search box where you can type and then submit • then enhance with auto suggestion @lornajane
What Can We Do? @lornajane
@lornajane
Web Standards HTML5 is changing the world. https://html5.org/ WCAG Web Content Accessibility Guidelines https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ @lornajane
Lorna’s Keyboard Challenge Stick a post-it over your trackpad while you drink your coffee at your desk. See what you can still get done. @lornajane
Resources • https://html5.org/ • https://vimium.github.io/ • https://govuk-elements.herokuapp.com/form-elements/ • https://wicg.github.io/spatial-navigation/demo/ • https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/ • https://github.com/wavexx/screenkey • https://lornajane.net @lornajane
Am I a disabled user? I don’t think I’m disabled but due to some RSI injury, a pointing device is an instrument of torture. As a keyboard-only user, I’d like to share some of my experiences of using the web and talk a bit about how my access to the web has changed, from the early days of “it all works if I turn off JavaScript” through a phase of doing OK when I was self-employed and chose my own tools, to today where “modern” web sites are increasingly locking me out of seemingly simple tasks. I’ll show you the world through my tools (and show you how to use them too) and try to point out the quick wins for improving accessibility as well as complaining loudly about the things I wish everyone would avoid!
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
