On 14-06-06 02:34 AM, Gilles Dubuc wrote:
I think that picking isolated websites (gmail or medium) isn't enough to get a sense of what the average user's expectation is. These two particular examples aren't necessarily the best for other reasons: Google products and Gmail in particular have always had very engineer-minded keyboard shortcuts because engineers rule the culture at Google. That's not necessarily the best thing for accessibility if you don't have that culture. As for Medium, it's too new to have proven itself as something with good accessibility. Maybe a lot of people are getting confused by medium's interface, we wouldn't know.
Possibly, it would help to re-word the way we're understanding these 2 examples, into the abstracts that they represent:-
In line- or list-item-highlights, like email programs (Thunderbird, etc), or file managers, or spreadsheets, or drop-down menus: - Clicking the keyboard down-arrow will move the highlight downwards by exactly one (1).
In full-window-highlights, like a PDF-viewer, or image-viewer, or webpage: - Clicking the keyboard down-arrow will make the content scroll-upwards. (by a variable amount, depending on OS, program, and user-settings. Sometimes 1 line, sometimes 3 lines, sometimes x pixels.)
(and similar results for left/right arrow-keys)
HTH.