The intent of this Success Crition is to reduce accidental activation of keyboard shortcuts. Character key shortcuts work well for many keyboard users, but are inappropriate and frustrating for speech input users — whose means of input is strings of letters — and for keyboard users who are prone to accidentally hit keys. +
The intent of this Success Criterion is to reduce accidental activation of keyboard shortcuts. Character key shortcuts work well for many keyboard users, but are inappropriate and frustrating for speech input users — whose means of input is strings of letters — and for keyboard users who are prone to accidentally hit keys. To rectify this issue, authors need to allow users to turn off or reconfigure shortcuts that are made up of only character keys.
+Even though this Success Criterion refers to character keys
, note that it's not relevant whether a shortcut can be activated using a single physical key on a keyboard, or if it requires a combination of keys to be pressed. For instance, on most full-size US and UK keyboard, the ? (question mark) symbol is accessed using Shift and the / (forward slash) key next to the right-hand Shift key. The é (lowercase e with an acute accent) requires the use of AltGr and e. The specific key combination required for certain characters will also vary depending on the user's keyboard layout. However, shortcuts that use these characters still fall under the requirements of this Success Criterion. What matters is that a shortcut relies on a printable character (letters, punctuation, numbers, symbol characters), and not the numbers of physical keyboard keys that users need to press to trigger it.
Note that this success criterion doesn't affect components such as listboxes and drop-down menus. Although these components contain values (words) that may be selected by one or more character keys, the shortcuts are only active when the components have focus. Other components such as menus may be accessed or opened with a single non-character shortcut (e.g., Alt or Alt+F) before pressing a single character key to select an item. This makes the full path to invoking a menu a two-step shortcut that includes a non-printable key. Accesskeys are also not affected because they include modifier keys.
Speech Input users generally work in a single mode where they can use a mix of dictation and speech commands. This works well because the user knows to pause before and after commands, and commands are usually at least two words long. So, for instance, a user might say a bit of dictation, such as "the small boat", then pause, and say a command to delete that dictation, such as "Delete Line". In contrast, if the user were to say the two phrases together without a pause, the whole phrase would come out as dictation (i.e., "the small boat delete line"). Although speech input programs often include modes that listen only for dictation or only for commands, most speech users use the all-encompassing mode all the time because it is a much more efficient workflow. It could decrease command efficiency significantly if users were to change to command mode and back before and after issuing each command.