For those of you that have put together a chart of access keys for your sitewide navigation, do you have any good suggestions?
From what I have gathered best practice is that IF accesskeys are used:
- Always supply a legend that defines the accesskeys.
- Make sure this legend is on or available from every page on the site...perhaps in an accessibility statement.
- Supply title attributes on any accesskeys used.
- Keep the number of accesskeys to a minimum.
I agree with Geoff. Because of the many conflicts, defining accesskeys seem to be a waste of time unless you are designing for a controlled environment such as an intranet.
In Joe Clark's Book, "Building Accessible Websites", New Riders Publishing, 2002, he suggests that there are at least 36 characters that can be used for accesskey attribute.
However, as pointed out previously, John Foliot and Derek Featherstone's unofficial survey/research concluded that there really were no useful access keys not already reserved by some application or other. When you take internationalization issues into account, it becomes pretty much of a hopeless cause.
For more details from John Foliot and Derek Featherstone's study visit:
- Accesskeys and Reserved Keystroke Combinations http://www.wats.ca/resources/accesskeysandkeystrokes/38
- Using Accesskeys - Is it worth it? http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeys/19
- More reasons why we don't use accesskeys http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeyconflicts/37
Also:
- I Do Not Use Accesskeys by Dave Shea.
http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2003/12/29/i_do_not_use/index.php
Laura
___________________________________________
Laura L. Carlson
Information Technology Systems and Services
University of Minnesota Duluth
Duluth, MN 55812-3009
http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/
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