Comment by abejora
6 hours ago
This is something that we have been working on in our app, but to be honest: it is hard. At first we wanted to be completely keyboard centric, but we had to pivot away from it.
There is so much to learn in this space.
There are small things, like dropping a 'jump to main content anchor' before the navigation so you don't have to tab through the top navigation everytime.
But there are also certain pages en layouts which require a lot of thought on a good keyboard navigation flow. Combine that with the need for responsive layouts, our inexperience with accessibility tools, etc; and the required effort quickly adds up.
This has always been a bit of a drag, but the way we/I used to do websites and the way I still like to do them, was to focus on content, then apply a style and javascript layer as decoration. The keyboard navigation and accessibility considerations come more naturally then. For those that don't see this as important it feels like a case of cart before the horse.
I ended up stuck on my back, bed-bound in 2005, with a keyboard on my thighs. Using OSX (probably Tiger) and mostly native apps it was possible to get by with just the keyboard. It was the only platform that I could use without a pointer and I was hardly pushing boundaries.
These days just doing simple things like setting up a computer for the first time, I often can't be arsed with a mouse, or I am in places where there isn't room to use a mouse. I have to resort sometimes to a trackball out of necessity, but it's always a hassle and I frequently hit brick walls. Simple file managers can be nightmare enough. I remember just trying to navigate to a taskbar on some desktops being impossible. I couldn't get to something like the network manager applet. Thankfully there's a CLI for that now.
On the flip side, I also love the idea that you can do most things with a simple pointer.
I was trying Batocera linux recently on a laptop, the touchpad wasn't recognised, it's a gamepad driven OS (I think a layer on retro-arch), and navigating with a gamepad (once you RTM and figure it out) is actually quite nice. Kodi, has always been a bit of a faff on the keyboard, and that works well with the gamepad. Kodi was born on the Xbox so this of course should be a given. The UI for me with a keyboard has always been a bit clumsy.
And this is where the conversation gets ugly. Yes accessibility is important. And if you can add it with little additional effort, great. But its not the most important thing when you’re trying to get something off the ground with limited resources.