Sortable using a up/down link

I'm using sortable to sort some lists, this is great but I want it to
be fool proof for my users. I want to be able to have an up, down,
left and right link next to the text so users can click on them to
sort the items rather than dragging. I have seen this done in
Scriptaculous using Sortable.setSequence but can't find anything
similar for jQuery.
Any ideas or code?
Thanks in advance,
Nick