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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Accesskeys on ALA

Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation is the first new technical article on A List Apart in months. I didn’t think there was much that could be said about accesskeys, but the tutorial has some nice ideas to help make them more obvious without being too intrusive. I think the approach demonstrated by the The Ontario Ministry of Energy site is the most appealing, with single letters corresponding to accesskeys underlined as they are in application menus.

Posted 16th June 2003 at 9:09 pm

This is Accesskeys on ALA by Simon Willison, posted on 16th June 2003.

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5 comments

  1. Except when Mozilla's type-ahead-find overrides it :S

    Joe Grossberg - 16th June 2003 21:31 - #

  2. Another cool part is that how they underline the access key letters: with the <em> tag applied to the letter, and redefined as text-decoration: underline.

    Micah - 16th June 2003 22:24 - #

  3. Joe, you have to hold a modifier to use an accesskey in Mozilla or Internet Explorer. On Windows, the modifier is Alt.

    Jesse Ruderman - 17th June 2003 08:21 - #

  4. I myself decided to apply <em> last year for the Access Key listing. Albeit I decided against underlining; since styling is applied via CSS and could easily be overridden by the liveware at the user-agent end, thus using CSS alone would be Catch-22.

    I agree that application of structural mark-up in general, to help define the "key value" should support the appropriate access-key that appears upon a web page assuming the key value appears within a specific word.

    Now for the strange beast called; Opera, holding down the ALT and pressing the appropriate acceskey may be an interesting exercise... I vaguely remember (not having the browser on this Novell workstation) it being something similar to SHIFT+ESC and the access key, which makes life more fun.

    Robert Wellock - 17th June 2003 15:01 - #

  5. Thx Robert. Note: it works for Phoenix too -- even though some other keybindings (e.g. CTRL-ALT-F for bringing up Google) didn't make it over from Mozilla.

    Joe Grossberg - 17th June 2003 17:50 - #

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