[thelist] Accessibility? Accesskey attribute.

Jim Dabell jim-lists.evolt.org at jimdabell.com
Mon Jul 29 18:16:01 CDT 2002


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On Monday 29 July 2002 9:23 pm, Austin Govella wrote:
> On Monday, July 29, 2002, at 02:30 PM, Donald Noble wrote:
> > Hi, I am curently trying to improve the accessibility of my personal
> > website ... As part of this I was considering adding
> > accesskeys to the main links on the page. The problem I forsee is that
> > (in IE at least) if I specify H for a link on my site, then Alt+H would
> > overfull the Help menu (on my system). This seems counter-productive to
> > me, so what are other peoples opinions on this?
>
> I looked very seriously at adding access keys to a banking site I did a
> while back, but I quickly discovered that many of the access key
> combinations I wanted were already in use by IE, NS, Opera, or the
> operating system.

I believe standard practice is to limit yourself to <accesskey>+[0-9].


> If it was possible to assign any combination of keys as an access key for
> your website, then there wouldn't be any problem. Unfortunately, I think
> you're limited to using the alt tag.

Alt _key_, right? :)


> Dreamweaver's built-in O'Reilly's reference suggests you can also use
> Ctrl or Command, but ti doesn't explain how you could do this. The W3C
> only mentions combinations using the Alt (Win) and the Cmd (Mac) keys.

This doesn't sound right to me; accesskeys are platform-dependent, and
should be handled by the user-agent.  Perhaps they were suggesting that you
can change this option in your browser settings, or trying to say that it's
not consistent across platforms?

One things I was wondering about earlier though - how do people decide on
which elements to give accesskeys to?  Given a decent-sized site, there
could well be too many main navigational links to assign a key to each
section.  Which sections are most important?  Are there common themes
across websites?  What about forms?

- --
Jim


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