WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: use of access keys (was: Next and Previous Accesskey)

for

From: Randy Pearson
Date: Oct 9, 2003 7:14AM


>> For example, Internet Explorer binds the keystroke ALT+D
to the address bar. An HTML defined accesskey for the letter D overrides the
keyboard binding to the address bar, and therefore disables that critical
keyboard shortcut for IE users.

F6 key does that in MSIE also, and cannot be overriden by accesskeys.
Incredibly, F6 also now does this in Mozilla. Very convenient.

>> ... who in their right mind can or will bother to learn all of them?

For the average site, hardly anyone. But say you subscribe to a daily or
weekly web-based "magazine" which uses a page-at-a-time publication design.
I would love to have an accesskey for the Next Page link. Otherwise, I have
to both grab the mouse *and* scroll to the top/bottom to find the link. In a
case like this, I would learn this critical accesskey. (Yes, I realize some
browsers support <link> tags for this, but that's another matter, and even
those functions don't seem to have keyboard shortcuts.)

-- Randy


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, suspend, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/