Accesskey

[kapitbisig]

Some accessibility experts says that accesskey is not a good practice for accessibility, do you agree? Why?

[Mittineague]

I would be interested in knowing why not. I can't think of any reasons where it would cause any problems by using it. But I can think of possible problems from not using it.

[gary.turner]

You may find this thread enlightening.

cheers,

gary

[AlexDawson]

Apart from the stuff in that other thread, you might find the following website interesting:

http://www.webaim.org/techniques/keyboard/accesskey.php

Thanks to browser differences and web designer inconsistencies with keeping to a convention... it's tainted goods and not fit for purpose, it's too fragmented.

[Mittineague]

Well, that info is a real eye-opener. I started using tabindex a while back. And I was keeping accesskey on the back burner until I got ambitious enough. But I'll definately rethink this now. I guess some kind of cross-browser/OS work around might concievably be possible, but it's more than I want to chew on ATM.

[felgall]

The complete list of all the keys that are actually safe to use and will always work as accesskeys lis below.

If you use keys not on that list then you will be specifying ones that will actually perform other actions under some situations where the key combination never even gets to the web page.

If the ones on the list are not sufficient for your requirements then using nuthe number keys are the group that come next in terms of the likelyhood that they will actually work.

[AlexDawson]

Who'd have thought it... felgall is funny

Shame that post doesn't really indicate anything that hasn't been said before (in a URL) or gives a useful alternative