[thelist] access keys

Dunstan Orchard dunstan at 1976design.com
Fri Oct 17 07:23:30 CDT 2003


Hi there,

I'm having some problems with access keys and wondered what you guys thought of it.

I have a site with many, many forms on it, some of them are quite long, and I've
found it very difficult to come up with unique access keys for every field on a
page.

In the end I decided just to use the first letter of the field label as the
access key and if that resulted in duplication the browser would just cycle
between these fields until the user had focus on their chosen input.

But, I've found that (suprise suprise) different browsers handel duplicated
access keys in different ways:

http://www.1976design.com/dev/accesskeys/

Mozilla simply skips to the last field of the duplicated group.
IE6 cycles through the fields in the duplicated group, but gets very confused
over radio buttons.
Opera and NS4 don't do access keys.

None of those behaviours are good news for me.

So, I guess I'm wondering if: (a) access keys are meant to be unique; (b) are
they really used very much or can I dump them; (c) am I doing more harm than
good by having duplicated access keys, and ; (d) can I get away with giving an
access key to the first field in each fieldset and then letting the user tab
from there on.

Any thoughts?

Thanks very much - Dunstan

---------------------------
Dorset, England
http://www.1976design.com/
http://www.1976design.com/blog/


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