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Article #6

Access Keys breaking in IE7 and Firefox2

By Leta Labuschagne, 30 May 2007.

Any webmaster who is concerned about accessibility for the disabled website visitor will define keyboard shortcuts as an alternative to menu item clicks.

According to the W3C HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, Section 6.3 Keyboard Access, the web developer should:

"Provide keyboard shortcuts to important links (including those in client-side image maps), form controls, and groups of form controls. [Priority 3]

Keyboard access to active elements of a page is important for many users who cannot use a pointing device. User agents may include features that allow users to bind keyboard strokes to certain actions. HTML 4.01 allows content developers to specify keyboard shortcuts in documents via the "accesskey" attribute.

Note: Until user agents provide an overview of which key bindings are available, provide information on the key bindings."

The accesskey attribute is used like this, where the link will be followed if the user activates the 'h' key:

<a accesskey="h" href="index.html">website home page</a>

To activate the key in Internet Explorer 5 and 6, the website visitor would need to press the Alt key, holding it down while pressing the 'h' key and the Enter key. In Firefox1 Alt + h would do the trick (without pressing the Enter key).

Now it is true that, until Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox2 were released, the web developer could choose logical characters to specify as keyboard shortcuts for important links, for example specify 'h' as the key to jump to the Home page, 'c' as the key to jump to the Contact Us page, and so forth. These logical choices make it easy for the disabled user to remember the keys and so to be able to quickly navigate a website.

Woe is me, alack and alas, this is no longer possible! Previously set keyboard shortcuts will fail in IE7 and Firefox2. To make the browsers themselves more accessible, those logical key strokes were annexed and now the keyboard shortcut Alt + h will open the browser's Help menu! If, however, the user is visiting a website where the accesskey 'h' has been assigned to the website's home page, the browser will be in conflict and may perform neither of the two possible actions.

The letters of the alphabet that have been used in IE7 as keyboard shortcuts in combination with the Alt key are: a, c, d, f, h, i, j, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u and z. The numbers 0 to 9 have not been used.

To be on the safe side web developers should select the keys 0 to 9 to specify as keyboard shortcuts, but that leaves only ten options, which may not be nearly enough for the average sized website. Another downside is the fact that it is not natural for the website visitor to form an easily remembered association between a number and a web page. All we can hope for is that web developers will start a new convention for website keyboard shortcuts, for example:

Those are probably the most important keyboard shortcuts consistently required by disabled users of websites on the World Wide Web.

About the author: Leta Labuschagne studied web design at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and is the Director of Goose Tree Web Design. This article may be freely copied and re-used as long as the author credit and this copyright statement remains intact.