Joe Gregorio
Congrats, your new site is redesigned, all shiny and new, and in the
redesign you decided to cover accessibility and
in the process start using
accesskey.
Now accesskey is neat, in that it
which gives you the power to re-map keys to move the keyboard
focus to a control or to follow a link, but with that power comes responsibility.
You can add an accesskey attribute
to a, area, button, input,
label, legend, and textarea.
I use the keyboard shortcuts for all my applications as much as possible. One of those keyboard shortcuts I use all day is Alt-D, which from within Mozilla or IE will jump the keyboard focus to the address bar of the browser. Unless of course, I'm reading your webpage where you have defined the ACCESSKEY D to jump to some particular link or web form element. Bugzilla is one such example. That is annoying. Don't do that. You are actually reducing your sites accessibility. While were at it, never define ACCESSKEY bindings for:
- F - File
- B - Bookmarks
- E - Edit
- V - View
- G - Go
- T - Tools
- H - Help
- A - Favorites
Your safest bet, if you want access keys, is to bind them to numeric keys only, which has the smallest chance of conflicting with browser based keyboard shortcuts.
Further reading: Improving accessibility with accesskey in HTML forms and links.
Update 1: Damian Cugley points out that the exact keys listed above can't be counted in because the shortcut keys for the browser depend on the I18N of the browser. All the more reason to stick to numeric access keys.
Update 2: Just stumbled across another site: National Film Board of Canada. Do I need to start a running list?
Posted by Peter Kovacs on 2003-09-05
Actually thie problem in my mind isn't the websites that do this it is the user agent.
A system key binding should not be able to be overridden by HTML.
One could go so far to assert that it is a security issue (I wouldn't) in that the standard behavior the user expects is now provided with a different mechanism. For example if you caught Alt-D event and then called a trigger to redirect you to another site...
Ideally the user agent would allow you to prevent this and even give the user a warning that a site is attempting to provide a new implementation of a standard key binding.
Posted by Kevin Burton on 2003-09-05
I agree, that fact that the access keys and user agents use the same meta key seems like a bug and not a feature.
Posted by Joe on 2003-09-06
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=128452
Posted by Martijn on 2003-09-07
Posted by Richard on 2003-12-03
[not that I use IE under Linux : )]
Posted by Chris Neale on 2004-01-01
The other trick is that the access-keys that cannot be used will vary according to the locale of your reader, because the words they are mnemonic for will of course be spelled differently...
The best approach I can think of to that little problem is to make sure that when I internationalize a web page, the access keys are included in the i18n effort. That will not save someone who is reading your page in English in a non-English browser, but that can't be helped.
Posted by Damian Cugley on 2003-09-04