Shortkey for "Save to Zotero" function for blind people?

Maihof
I study at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. One of my peers is blind. He experiences trouble with "icon-driven" applications. For the most part he can rely on a set of short keys to substitute his handicap. But there's no shortkey for the "Save to Zotero" icon at the end of the address bar.
Anybody have any idea what he could do?

Thanks!

felix
  • adamsmith
    Have a look at keyconfig:
    http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=72994
    to assign keyboard shortcuts to functions.

    Check out the Zutilo extension,
    https://github.com/willsALMANJ/Zutilo
    which both lists the names of functions - including the Save to Zotero icon - for use in keyconfig and adds some additional ones.
  • dstillman
    We should still add shortcut keys for "Save to Zotero" and for "Create New Item from Current Page", though. Suggestions?
  • adamsmith
    agreed - I use keynconfig because I want those:
    I use ctrl+alt+i (for "import") for "Save to Zotero"
    and ctrl+alt+w (for "webpage") for "Create New Item"

    I found that at least on my linux set-up a lot of ctrl+alt combinations were altready taken (e.g. ctrl+alt+t (translate) to open the terminal and ctrl+alt+s (scrape) to minimize a window).
  • dstillman
    edited July 26, 2013
    OK, another report of this. Let's fix this.

    Those conflicts on Linux (which I can reproduce) are a shame. But while it's a little bit (i.e., half a decade) late for this, maybe we should switch all of Zotero's shortcuts to Ctrl-Shift on Windows and Linux instead of Ctrl-Alt? Firefox itself uses Ctrl-Shift on both platforms. We're now much smarter about intercepting shortcuts within the Zotero pane without overriding existing Firefox shortcuts, so other than the main Z shortcut we wouldn't need to worry about Firefox conflicts at all, we'd be consistent with them, and we also wouldn't conflict with system shortcuts on Linux. (Ctrl-Alt-T is actually an existing Zotero shortcut to show/hide the tag selector, and it's now defunct at least on Ubuntu.) I think using S for "Save to Zotero" would be nice.
  • adamsmith
    Awesome, I'd love to have this work without keyconfig.

    I'd be happy moving this to ctrl+shift, though it may cause some grumbling - people (me included) get used to shortcuts. No idea how much grumbling though.
  • sharachchandra
    Dan, I strongly support the idea of shifting all Zotero's Cntrl-Alt shortcuts to Cntrl-Shift on Windows. Not only because of the linux conflict, but also on Windows most people tend to set up Windows shortcuts (for launching new programmes) using Cntrl-Alt (I have C-A-W for word, C-A-X for excel, C-A-E for endnote, C-A-A for Access, and so on). So a move to Cntrl-shift would be great, and ideally, if you could make these also editable, then people would have the flexibility to re-assign. I don't know anything about programming so cannot offer to help, but...:-)
  • sharachchandra
    Just thinking about it a bit more: in most Windows programmes, Cntrl-S is save, Cntrl-N is new item or new something. So would it make sense to set these two at least without Shift?
  • Gracile
    edited July 31, 2013
    But while it's a little bit (i.e., half a decade) late for this, maybe we should switch all of Zotero's shortcuts to Ctrl-Shift on Windows and Linux instead of Ctrl-Alt?
    FWIW, on some keyboards layouts, AltGr (ctrl+alt) is used to type diacritics/ligatures. In my case, for instance, if I type AltGr+o, Zotero creates a new note which begins by "œ"… Not a big deal but Ctrl+shift would solve that.

    Edit: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/29/101121.aspx
  • dstillman
    OK, changed to Ctrl-Shift for Windows/Linux in the latest 4.0 Branch dev XPI.
    Just thinking about it a bit more: in most Windows programmes, Cntrl-S is save, Cntrl-N is new item or new something. So would it make sense to set these two at least without Shift?
    No, I don't think so. Ctrl-S is really for saving the current document opened in a given application to disk. In this case, it's not Zotero's own document; it's Firefox's. Importing Firefox's current webpage as a bibliographic item into Zotero is a pretty different operation.

    It also might make sense for the Save to Zotero shortcut to work with the Zotero pane closed or unfocused, and Ctrl-S would of course conflict with Firefox's Save command.
  • dstillman
    Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-S will be a Firefox-wide shortcut (i.e., it will work outside the Zotero pane) for "Save to Zotero" in 4.0.10.

    For further accessibility, it'd be good to add all the Save to Zotero actions to the web page context menu. Issue created.
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