Out of the way

SMIL 2.1 is a recommendation. In many ways this is good, but in one way it is terribly disappointing. I have carried out an ongoing discussion with John Foliot, in particular, through several years, about accesskey.

It is pretty clear that accesskey is broken. There has been a suggested fix going around for about 5 years - since even before SMIL 2.0 was published. It would have been nice, in one of the rare W3C specifications that has actually dealt with accesskey and touched the semantics (not like HTML, which hasn't changed in 7 years - and still people build tools that get it wrong!) to fix accesskey.

Nope.

Hopefully W3C will deal with the problem soon, with some new work (apparently they are not happy to go with the work done over the last few years). In the meantime, hang on folks. You'll be able to get to work productively in a couple more years, if you're lucky. Revising a specification after several years, W3C can make it work for mobile browser vendors, but can't actually come at fixing a simple accessibility problem.

This is partly my responsibility. Most of the time I am in WAI's Protocols and Formats group, who have the responsibility of making sure this doesn't happen. That group has done quite a lot of work on accesskey in particular. But when the SMIL 2.1 last call was out I was doing other things (looking for work, for example) and not in the group. It seems everyone blinked, and it seems they don't have the clout to actually make a difference if it is going to inconvenience anyone.

Meanwhile W3C convinced the National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities Research Institute to write a testimonial about it claiming "everything is accessible". It is very hard to see what happens in practice, since for the only SMIL 2.1 player I could find has Minimal user-level documentation is included in the player. It is similar for other SMIL 2 players - if anyone can find documentation of how accesskey works in a SMIL 2 player I would be very interested. In the meantime we simply hope that the goodwill everyone claims whenever accessibility is mentioned gets carried through into practical implementation. History isn't on our side

For other formats you can use Opera - our accesskey implementation, in common with iCab, doesn't follow the "helpful suggestion" written so many years ago and responsible for so totally breaking the usability of accesskeys in Firefox/Mozilla and in Internet Explorer. I hope that developers copy the approach of one of us, rather than perpetuating the broken User Interface models of the latter two browsers in SMIL.

If you do, I suggest re-mapping the accesskey mode activation to a single key from the default of shift-escape. Go into Preferences, choose the Advanced tab, and Shortcuts. Select either default setup under keyboard shortcuts, or your current setup if you already use a modified set. Then the easiest thing to do is type "access" into the search box, which will bring up the option "Enter Accesskey mode | Leave Accesskey mode". (It's under applications, if you're exploring the huge range of options that are available). Pick your key, and away you go...