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Re: Next and Previous Accesskey

for

From: Eoin Campbell
Date: Oct 6, 2003 10:35AM

Hi Randy,
I would be very interested in any articles on recommended ACCESSKEY attribute
assignments. Could you post the links?
Specificaly on your question, I'm not sure that accesskeys are necessary at all
for Next and Previous page, since browsers support this navigation by default.

We defined our own 'standard' keys, which we have implemented on a number
of client sites, mostly Irish Public Sector organisations. It would be nice
to have a near-universal accesskey standard that was language-, website-, browser-
and screen-reader independent.

We decided to use numbers rather than letters, to minimise conflicts with
browsers and screen-readers, and avoid language dependencies.
Here is the set of key assignments we came up with:
Access key 1 - Home page
Access key 2 - About us
Access key 3 - Events
Access key 4 - Frequently Asked Questions
Access key 5 - Site Map
Access key 6 - Contact points
Access key 7 - Search
Access key 8 - Skip to side navigation bar
Access key 9 - Skip to content
Access key 0 - Accessibility statement

Using numbers has the disadvantage that you cannot highlight them within the
text of the link on screen (e.g. <a href="/"><span style="text-decoration: underline">H</span>ome</a>).

Some of the pages/links are (or should be) present on every website, so it would
be nice if universal accesskeys were defined.



At 23:01 04/10/2003 -0600, Randy Pearson wrote:
>I've read some online articles about standard ACCESSKEY assignments. For an
>on-line magazine or book, or perhaps a search results situation, where
>content is delivered in individual pages, and Next/Previous navigation is
>important, are there any "standard" ACCESSKEY assignments recommended for
>these 2 functions?
>
>It seems like you could use "N" for Next and "P" for Previous, but that is
>English-only, and using any letters can conflict with other expected browser
>functionality. I could randomly pick unused numbers on our site (say 5 and
>6), but would rather go with something standard, even if a fledgling
>standard.

--
Eoin Campbell, Technical Director, XML Workshop Ltd,
10 Greenmount Industrial Estate, Harolds Cross, Dublin 12, IRELAND.
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Phone: +353 1 4547811; Fax: +353 1 4496299
Web: http://www.xmlw.ie
YAWC Online: http://www.yawconline.com/
YAWC Pro: http://www.yawcpro.com/



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