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?"

Comments

Meh.

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Sounds like a good idea, and as a keyboard cowboy I appreciate it, but the first time I tried to leave a webpage by hitting alt+d to go to the address bar to type a url and got a donation page I was instantly turned off by the idea. While you can do it right, its rarely worth the effort unless you're doing a full out web app, and even then keep it optional.

Not just OS specific

[paulbiz]

It changes from one browser to the next. I believe in Opera you need to press Shift-ESC then the access key. Others may use ALT or some kind of platform-specific modifier key.

A program theoretically shouldn't interfere with the system commands, but...

In a world where we assume ALT is the access key modifier, and Alt-F is one of the shortcuts, does that deny them the ability to press Alt-F to access the File menu? I don't think there is any consistent behavior at all.

Check out this page. It has a table of known conflicts or potential problems.

I tried using on a company intranet site, simply for my own amusement, and gave up. While I thought it was nice to press Alt-N to view the news page, nobody else knew how to use it or cared to learn. Most of them never take their hand off the mouse anyway (if they are physically able to choose).

Re:Not just OS specific

[IntlHarvester]

> 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.

Display accesskeys using CSS

[Chris Pimlott]

I tried using on a company intranet site, simply for my own amusement, and gave up. While I thought it was nice to press Alt-N to view the news page, nobody else knew how to use it or cared to learn.

Did they even know they were there? I find that many sites use AccessKeys but give no indication that they do or what they are. Luckily you can use a handy bit of CSS to help out.

Using the selector before pseudo selector, you have have the accesskey shown automatically displayed before the element. For example, I have this in my Mozilla userContent.css:

a[accesskey]:before {
    content: " " attr(accesskey) " ";

    text-transform: uppercase;
    white-space: pre;
    border: thin solid;
    font-family: sans-serif;
    text-decoration: underline overline;
    margin-right: 0.5ex;
}

The first two lines are the important part, the rest is just styling to make it look nice. Specifically, it adds a small box with the capitalized access key character before any link that uses one.

For example, when I visit Freshmeat, the menu at the top looks something like this:

[H] home | [B] browse | [A] articles | contact | chat | submit

It's a neat trick and can be very handy. While it's true most sites don't use accesskeys, there's more out there than you might expect, and the ones that do almost never advertise it.

No problem when properly implemented

[Baloo Ursidae]

No point in making a web browser use the same keys for navigation as for itself. Too bad only the KDE developers have really thought this through so far.

Because of this, the only browser to properly implement it so far is Konqueror. Press control, and access key labels appear over the appropriate links. Press that key.

Use Numbers

[Gryftir]

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.