Doug Turner, the Minimo lead developer, and longtime Mozilla hacker, has created a couple of special Firefox builds with an awesome experimental feature called "spatial navigation".
This feature was designed for television remote control style navigation for Minimo (built for pioneer research) but I think it's right at home in a full-featured browser. To use it, just grab one of the Firefox builds from DougT's site and after starting Firefox, just hold the Shift and Alt keys and you can navigate the links on the page with your four arrow keys.
You don't have to worry about the flow of the page like you do tabbing through links, you can just arrow your way around. It's hard to explain but once you've used it for a while, you won't want to be without it.
The feature will be evaluated for possible inclusion in later Firefox releases - after we get more community feedback and settle on some UI issues like color/highlighting. You can help us by grabbing this experimental Firefox build and playing with the new feature (and playing with the feature preferences.
I'm excited about both the increased usability and the improved accessibility that this feature ads to Firefox. What do you think?
