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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

Saying "I can't navigate a website just using my keyboard" is sort of like saying "I can't drive my car just using the steering." Well, of course you can't. You're not supposed to be able to, unless you have some sort of assistance hardware/software loaded that articulates/emulates the missing control(s).

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I'm a little confused how a person can play a 3D video game with just a keyboard, but a website is beyond control? I don't think a car is a good comparison as it is in 3D space unlike a website.

Because there’s a very small defined set of actions a person can take in such games: backwards, forwards, left, right, etc.

By comparison pages have dozens of links, form fields, menus, etc. It’s not that they can’t be navigated with the keyboard alone, it’s that it’s rarely the most efficient way of doing it. Clicking a link will always be quicker than pressing tab X number of times to select it.

> pressing tab X number of times

You seem to be under the impression that Netscape style navigation is the best a keyboard can do, which makes the argument an involuntary strawman.

Spatial navigation and caret navigation blow a pointing device out of the water.

Tab is not how most keyboard only users navigate web pages. There are an entire set of built-in keyboard navigation utilities for those that cannot use a pointing device.

If I have never learned this entire set, I bet you that my mum won't learn it. Most users not only aren't power users - they have zero interest in becoming power users.

The fact that pressing tab x times is so slow is exactly the point. Our support for keyboard navigation is really crappy.

I navigate the web mostly via keyboard. Vimium [1] is the First Plugin I install on every desktop browser.

The car analogy makes little sense.

[1]: https://vimium.github.io

Heard of it before but you comment made me actually see vimium in action. It seems like a potential tool for me! Thank you.

I'm intrigued because navigating this way makes UI much closer to a touchscreen experience: there's no mouseover, mouseout, focus states.

Just when is a thread about VT terminals also an HN front now, have you ever seen how fast people could navigate on those terminals 20, 30 years ago. No website can do the same thing today, no mater how much CPU power you have.

Even Lynx/Links is super fast on the supported sites.

In high school, I came into computer class only to find the mouse was broken.

Whatever, I used keyboard commands for the entire class period; was fine.

Next day they handed me a fine for breaking the mouse. Turns out they didn’t think it possible for someone to use a computer without a mouse.

Took a legally threatening letter to get them to back off.

From the very beginning, the web was multimodal. Why can't you navigate it with just a keyboard?

What proof do you have that you're "not supposed to be able to" navigate a website with only your keyboard? What authoritative statement dictates that the web should require usage of a mouse? If you take a second to look at that statement, you should be able to see how it is quite ableist (possibly unintentionally).

Not everyone can use a mouse or similar UI interaction device, but not only is a keyboard generally usable, there are a ton of accessibility devices that can mimic a keyboard's signals. Not nearly as simple to emulate a mouse or similar pointing device.

That's why keyboard usability is important.

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