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Benefits of Using Access Keys in HTML?
kandresen asks: "I have been considering the use of access keys in my web site as an accessibility feature, and was originally looking at possible side effects this could have for people with PCs and Macs, however in my search I found the problem was far wider than just that, as people with different language version of these OS'es may have different key bindings. Many of the websites I deal with have an International reach, so I can see this may limit the available keys quite a bit. The better approach, which would avoid the entire problem, unfortunately does not seem to be a reality, even in the upcoming version of XHTML 2. So, I wonder whether other webmasters have had many complaints from their users regarding the use of access keys interfering with system specific shortcuts, such as bookmarking, help functions, accessing of favorites, and so forth. Do you have any tips as for how to avoid negative side effects? Are there some keys that do not cause much problems regardless of language, OS, or the client being used? Is there a way to use Javascript to take care of such problems?"
> nobody else knew how to use it or cared to learn.
Aside from accessiblity (maybe a screen reader picks it up and communicates it?) -- I've seen AccessKeys used successfully in several webapps that replaced old style terminal applications, where there's a trained userbase doing data entry type stuff.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Maybe it's just me, but I've always felt that numbers were the natural access key for web applications.
International reach? You know any keyboards that DON'T use arabic numerals in the same place on the keyboard?
As for program conflicts, You need to make the site distinguish between firefox on linux and on other systems, since I believe the default on linux to switch between tabs is alt-(number key). You also need to
give users the option to turn it off if they are using windows readers such as JAWS. But other then that, there are no conflicts.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
The plone folks have spent some real time & energy on accessibility as well as standard based design. The nice part is this leads the way for anyone building their own site with plone to get to these standards quickly - esp. in their latest release.
If you are trying to tackle accessibility, I recommend using plone, or at least looking at their code (you wouldn't be the first to use plone 'code' outside plone - I remember wikipedia css crediting plone... http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.cs s?5 )
Not only do they have hotkeys and use valid xhtml and css, they also explain all this, list the (numeric based) keys, differences between browsers, and link this info from every page (upper right) as prominently as the site-map and contact links.
(And no, I am not a plone committer/member, just an occasional user.)
...begins in wonder