Agree Flash can be a right git.   It's an accessibility headache in general.

When flash has focus, you loose your usual shortcuts.  Example trying to scroll using the down arrow becomes useless.  How do you release the keyboard focus from Flash (without clicking outside the Flash region)?  Not to mention how you actually drive a Flash element with the keyboard.

Another form of hijacking that I come across is using the right and left arrows for browsing a picture gallery in a web page.  They are a nice shortcut, but what happens if your window isn't wide enough and you have a horizontal scroll bar?

Yeah ill considered and inconsistant (such is life...)

There are still many uses for the mouse. It'll be a while till it gets a real alternative.

And hey, I love shortcuts, but I'm only human. Sometimes I'm lazy and I want to operate with the bare minimum fingers/movement. I've even got an extension to my browser so whenever I've marked a word I can quickly search for a trailer in youtube, or search imdb, wikipedia, and so on... I use it more often than you might think :D

I've used the keyboard navigation extension for Chrome.  There used to be a numbered links option in Lynx, that it reminds me of.  I'm a Firefox user myself (for reasons I shan't bore you with.)  If you use the ' key, you can search the page for text in links, which is pretty good for jumping to and activating them.

I actually have more of an issue with the keyboard as a physical device, than the mouse.  The mouse overall I'd hazard to suggest increases accessibility.

I tried driving my old Apple Powerbook (Tiger) with just the touchpad and got surprisingly far with it.  Alternatively I tried to control it through use of keyboard only - useful for say sitting down across the room with a keyboard on your lap.  It's really irritating though when you feel stuck, and are stranded without the pointer.

The Apple desktop OS fared well though.  I guess thier attention to detail helped bring iOS alive.  How much can you do on your smartphone/tab, before you bring up the onscreen keyboard?

Projects like Dasher show how much you can do with just the simple pointer.

That TrackIR device is a great example of a natural feeling interface that can augment the cybernetic experience.  (I thought it was going to be a link to a head driven pointing device.  I remember a demo of someone moving a pointer with their lip, paralysis dictated the need for it.)

I love the simplicity and elegance of the pointer.  The mouse sometimes gets a bad press.  It's the disjoint between keyboard and mouse that can feel odd.  You feel it less on a laptop, due to the proximity of the touchpad/nipple and keyboard.

What irritates me is keeping a button depressed while moving the pointer.  Dragging for me is a drag, mainly because I end up exerting too much pressure on the button.  There are some accessibility options for this, like simulating a click on the touchpad, but I end up accidentally hitting it half the time.

There are some tasks that a pointer does really well at and some not so.  I find pointer driven (nested) menus hard going.  And those without much (or lacking the finesse in) motor control must do too.  Moving through a pop up menu feels easier with the keyboard for me.

I do feel some kind of barrier when trying to use programs that are primarily mouse driven, I'm then like a fish out of water.  Some people feel just as awkward when confronted with the command line and left to the keyboard.

I liked the demo of the TrackIR, how could you utilize it?

It's probably a non-open proprietry product which might preclude the use of it.  The Kinnect is another device with amazing potential.

How does the TrackIR work?  I assume there is a gyroscope in the TrackIR headset.  I couldn't work out if the other device was a camera or a 3D tracker for the headset attachment.  It might actually be quite simple, compared with say the Kinnect - which I figure must use a ton of CPU.