Access Keys Plugin (Testing Volunteers Needed)

Cory Bohon

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Oct 16, 2009, 9:52:59 PM10/16/09

to Omeka Dev

Hi All,

I'm a student at the University of South Carolina Upstate, where I'm
currently researching Universal Access with regards to digital
humanities archives. For this project, we're focusing on Omeka because
it's a newer project with a lot of potential.

Getting to the point: I've developed a plugin for Omeka called "Access
Keys" that allows you to assign access keys (http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Access_key) to specific functions for Omeka.

The initially included functions are:
- Go to home
- Browse by items
- Browse by collections
- Go to previous item (only available when browsing items)
- Go to next item (only available when browsing items)
- Go to Advanced Search

Here's what I would like to propose: If this plugin at all interests
you, please download it from my site (below) and help me test it out.
I only have a test collection that I've been trying it out on and I
would like to have some extra people looking at it and giving me
feedback.

Download "Access Keys" Plugin here: http://corybohon.com/downloads/AccessKeys.zip

I would appreciate any comments or feedback that you could provide me
with.

Thanks in advance,

Cory Bohon

Personal website: http://corybohon.com
Project website: http://looklistentouch.org

Dave Lester

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Oct 26, 2009, 1:14:28 PM10/26/09

to Omeka Dev

Hi Cory,

Thanks for sharing your first Omeka plugin with the rest of the
community! I ran into a few problems that I want to discuss. First,
a few minor/general things:

* There should be no space in the AccessKeys folder name.
* You can remove the views and models directories since you're not
using them.

The big problem is that it's not working properly in my browser. I
reviewed the code and I see what you're doing -- using the
public_theme_header hook to insert content into the page. Note that I
have no experience with using accesskeys.. so I'm wondering: is it
possible to add the markup for accesskeys in the header of a document,
have it still validate and work? Right now the HTML is inserted
within the <head> element and it looks a little funky in my text
editor.

As a test, I tried modifying your code to use the public_theme_footer
hook instead, but I still had no luck getting my accesskeys to work.
Yes, I can see that the markup is being sent to the page properly, but
my browser (Firefox 3.5) isn't working w/ the access keys. Any ideas?

Otherwise, I like what you've done with the plugin configuration and
saving options to the database.. very nice!

Dave

Jeremy Boggs

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Oct 26, 2009, 9:48:15 PM10/26/09

to omek...@googlegroups.com

On Oct 26, 2009, at 1:14 PM, Dave Lester wrote:

The big problem is that it's not working properly in my browser. I
reviewed the code and I see what you're doing -- using the
public_theme_header hook to insert content into the page. Note that I
have no experience with using accesskeys.. so I'm wondering: is it
possible to add the markup for accesskeys in the header of a document,
have it still validate and work? Right now the HTML is inserted
within the <head> element and it looks a little funky in my text
editor.

Adding an <a> element as a child of the <head> element is invalid HTML, so this might be cause an issue in some browsers. It is working fine for me in Firefox, though. I tried using the <link> tag in the header instead. The accesskey attribute is not, however, a valid attribute for <link>

I looked into this a bit more, and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to filter the output of the nav() helper to add additional attributes directly. This would be very handy to have, especially for a plugin like this. I've added a ticket to explore this possibility in a future version of Omeka.

In the meantime, Cory, you could do as Dave suggests, and add the links using public_theme_footer(), then hide them with CSS. This would make the markup valid while hiding the duplicate content. Hopefully we can add something in the future to let you add those attributes to the links directly.