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What do 'character key' and 'printable' mean? #386

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r12a opened this issue Sep 21, 2017 · 2 comments
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What do 'character key' and 'printable' mean? #386

r12a opened this issue Sep 21, 2017 · 2 comments
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~comment-character-key-shortcuts i18n-comment Member Comment

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@r12a
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r12a commented Sep 21, 2017

Success Criterion 2.4.11 Character Key Shortcuts§
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#character-key-shortcuts

If a keyboard shortcut consisting entirely of one or more character keys is implemented by the content, then a mechanism is available to turn it off or to remap it to a shortcut that uses at least one non-character key.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#dfn-character-key

single printable Unicode code point, any keyboard character that is printable, i.e. letters of the alphabet including capitals, punctuation, numbers, and symbols

Note that the Space and Enter keys, which return empty spaces rather than characters, are not character keys.

It would be better to more clearly define what is and isn't a 'character key', and what 'printable' means. (The UI Events specs may help?) I'm not clear why the space character couldn't be a shortcut key – see it's use, for example, in Thunderbird to scroll down messages then on to the next message.
@r12a r12a mentioned this issue Sep 21, 2017
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@StommePoes
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Space to scroll down is a regular thing in many applications, including browsers. But you can say the same for the Enter key-- most applications use it to engage a control. In fact, space does this too. It's built into many UIs like selecting checkboxes. Would be good to know what the reasons were for exempting space though.

As a developer, I take "printable keys" as keys who would trigger oninput (except delete), then minus the ones listed in the SC.

This was referenced Jan 4, 2018
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@awkawk
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awkawk commented Jan 21, 2018

(Official WG Response)
Thank you for the comment. We have re-written the criterion to incorporate your suggestion. The updated SC can be viewed at: http://rawgit.com/w3c/wcag21/master/guidelines/index.html#character-key-shortcuts

@awkawk awkawk closed this as completed Jan 21, 2018
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