Keyboard accessibility in web applications

Author: Mihai Şucan (ROBO Design)

This is a three-parts article in which we focus on making a paint application keyboard accessible. We continue from the final example provided in the previous article I wrote on how to create your own paint application.

1. Keyboard shortcuts for tool activation. This part also provides details on how to implement keyboard shortcuts for each drawing tool.
2. Drawing with the keyboard. This part details the implementation of an extension to the paint application which allows users to draw with the keyboard, without any pointing device.
3. Cross-browser compatibility. This part explains how you can implement a cross-browser compatibility layer for handling DOM keyboard events.

The code presented throughout the entire article is based on the code used in the open-source projects PaintWeb and libmacrame.

Enjoy your reading!