Re: [orca-list] Can we drop FireVox support in Orca?

[Jason White <jason jasonjgw net>]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 02:36:05AM -0500, Mike Reiser wrote:
> This could be one option and would be usefull.  However, it seems easier 
> to select from a list with just the press of a key once or twice to jump 
> to the desired link. 

Note that with the text search, the number of keystrokes is minimized. If it
doesn't match on the first character, then you type the second character; if
that is insufficient to give a unique match you move on to the third, and so
on. typing enter activates the link as usual. So, if you add up the number of
keystrokes I suspect the result would be similar to having a list of links
mode in many cases.

What would be even better, though, is an automatic procedure that creates
access keys for every link or form control in a document. I can't remember
whether Mozilla have a mechanism for eliminating keyboard conflicts, but
assuming this is the case, it shouldn't be infeasible to design code that
would assign access keys in documents that don't already have them. For
example, start by assigning an access key based on the first character of the
link; (avoiding punctuation); if that's taken, move to the second character,
and so on. I expect there could be some tricky internationalization issues
here as to what characters to skip - basically, anything that serves the
purpose of whitespace or punctuation in the relevant script. Further effort
could be invested in the algorithm in an attempt to make the automatically
assigned access keys more mnemonic.

Access keys in the HTML specification are defined as Unicode characters, with
the result that they are fully international, at least in principle.

All of this would have to be implemented in a Firefox extension, I suspect.