Adapt Learning Community: Keyboard shortcuts for Authoring Tool

Hi,

just to raise this item here as it has come out of the design review. (Thanks, Mark for the comment).

What are everyone's thoughts on implementing keyboard shortcuts into the authoring tool? I assume we will be doing this and create a list of items and how they apply in the various sections of the authoring tool. However, we haven;t really covered this in the requirements just yet.

It would be good to get the discussion going and may see some suggestions for what keyboard shortcuts people would like to see.

Thanks,
Sven

Hi Sven, here's my first pass based on the design mockups:

Standard conventions for Undo,Redo, Copy and Paste, along with delete. ie: Ctrl+Z,Ctrl+Y, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V and Delete key
Something for Preview that's easy to hit, possibly Shift+Enter like Flash or one of the F keys?
ESC to back out of menus one level
Arrow keys to navigate

One of the accessibility features we were made aware of recently is the importance of keyboard navigation, and this resource sets out recommendations for website widget navigation with keyboard controls, so I think this will be a good resource for you:

http://access.aol.com/dhtml-style-guide-working-group/

Also the importance of tab selection through the controls in a logical order, with being able to hit enter to follow the link/invoke the selection, with visual highlighting of the one currently selected.

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Agree with Mathew on the accessibility controls - but I wonder if the tool would need something to toggle between keyboard nav and non-keyboard nav. And something on screen to show whether or not keyboard nav is enabled (a tick box maybe?)

For example, if I'm writing some text for a page and press Enter, I'd want this to be interpreted as a paragraph break. But an accessible keyboard navigation might interpret this as 'Close page', depending on what's highlighted.

I'd also say standard formatting shortcuts for easy text editing (e.g. Bold, italic) would be useful.

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A small point to add, but in my experience ctrl+shift+z is taking over as a keyboard shortcut for redo, especially in more developer-facing tools. In fact I've just checked in Sublime text and it actually supports both shortcuts for redo, so that might be something to consider.

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