New feature for Liferay 7: Quick Access

Hi everyone!

Today, I'm showing you a new accessibility feature that we'll be adding in the next Liferay Portal version.

As you know, making sites accessible is one of the hardest things to achieve on web development. In Liferay, we're always trying to improve on this area. For some time now, we've had a hidden Skip to Content link that shows on the first Tab stroke. This grants keyboard users a fast way to access the content and skip all the navigation elements on the top of the page.

 

For Liferay Portal 7.0, we wanted to take this idea a little bit further. Now, instead of just a link, we provide a small list of actions that are sequentially activated and allows a keyboard user to access specific parts of the page very quickly.

The good news is that, in addition to the out of the box shortcuts that some of the portlets will provide, you can use this in your themes to add shortcuts from your themes:

Velocity:

#quick_access("#main-content")
Freemarker:
<@liferay.quick_access contentId="#main-content" />

 

Also, with the new liferay-ui:quick-access-entry taglib you can add not only anchors, but custom actions via JavaScript as well!!

<%
String taglibOnClick = "Liferay.Util.focusFormField('#" + namespace + "keywords');";
%>

<liferay-ui:quick-access-entry label="skip-to-search" onClick="<%= taglibOnClick %>" />

 

What do you think? Will you be adding quick access shortcuts to your developments?

Blogs
This will be very useful from the usability point of view. Today i had a meeting with a Malaysian Govt Organisation at Kuala Lumpur and strongly recommended them to upgrade to the latest version of Liferay from their current 6.0 version which is almost three years old. Showed them some of the fascinating new features and they were quite impressed. Keep up the good work.

Ahamed Hasan
Author, Liferay Cookbook
Great Job. I tried this feature for testing in my development. I liked this features.
Great Job. I tried this feature for testing in my development. I liked this features.
Great Job. I tried this feature for testing in my development. I liked this features.