Updated Mozilla Keyboard Navigation spec.

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Greetings,

After reviewing the many hundreds of comments and messages generated by the 
first Mozilla/Gecko Keyboard Navigation Proposal, I'm pleased to announced our 
second draft is available for review, at:

  http://www.mozilla.org/access/keyboard/proposal

After the huge volume of feedback, we carefully re-thought a number of things 
and especially took to heart the frequent request for configurability.  To 
that end we have decided to prune some of the commands from this second draft 
to cover only "core" navigation to be implemented directly in C in Gecko. 
Configurability is most easily done in JavaScript extensions, and that is 
where we feel all of the "item navigation" work is best done.  This is also 
where much of the "specialized for specific accessibility needs" navigation 
falls as well - blind users for example finding good table item navigation 
particularly important where a general keyboard user wouldn't benefit as much.

Sun plans to implement all of the specific keyboard navigation items discussed 
in the specification (with exceptions clearly noted).  We believe that item 
navigation is important, but we don't propose to implement that immeidately - 
both because there is yet no clear concensus as to how it should be done, and 
because we feel that it is urgent that we have "core keyboard navigation" 
working well as quickly as possible.

Sun's Mozilla engineering team has been posting source tarballs of Mozilla 
periodically containing all of Sun's changes to a Mozilla 1.7 branch, where 
our work is taking place toward a release we are working on.  This second 
draft notes which portions of the keyboard navigation proposal are implemented 
in Mozilla trunk, which have thus far only be implemented in the Sun Mozilla 
1.7 branch, and which have yet to be implemented anywhere.


I encourage you to review this draft, and send your comments again only to 
<mozilla-accessibility mozilla org>.  I also encourage you to try those 
portions of the keyboad navigation proposal which have been implemented.  You 
can see Sun's most recent Mozilla 1.7 branch tarball at: 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/accessibility/sun-mozilla-1.7/12-03-2004/


Sincerely,


Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team