access keys standards; tag accesskey

G

guiderocksalt

Concerning the use of 'accesskey' and "standands".
I plan on assigning accesskey values based on what I found here.
http://www.clagnut.com/blog/193
Is this legit? Is this common practice? Comments? What does the
community do?
Thanks.
 
H

Harlan Messinger

Concerning the use of 'accesskey' and "standands".
I plan on assigning accesskey values based on what I found here.
http://www.clagnut.com/blog/193
Is this legit? Is this common practice? Comments? What does the
community do?

It's pointless in most cases for a couple of reasons.

1. It's only useful for a site where the typical user will use it
extensively for repetitive navigational and/or interactive tasks, such
as data entry, searching, or browsing on structured pages with anchors,
whether such repetition is in connection with a one-time task (entry of
a mailing list record by record, for example) or a frequently performed
task (daily filling out of one's timesheet, for example). In all other
cases, a user will have no reason to learn the access keys you've
provided because (a) he will have finished what he was doing with your
site before having finished learning them or (b) will forget them by the
time he returns or (c) isn't expecting to return anyway.

2. They collide with the shortcut keys defined by the operating system
and by the browser. In particular, when a user doesn't know that a page
has defined a particular access key that he normally uses for another
function, he will be frustrated when use of that key doesn't give the
expected result.
 
J

Jukka K. Korpela

Scripsit (e-mail address removed):
I plan on assigning accesskey values

Don't. The expert consensus is that accesskey attributes are more or
less useless, with some mild disagreement on whether they are
occasionally useful or often worse than useless. I'm pretty sure that
googling with
accesskey accessibility
will lead you to some discussions and explanations on this.
 

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