peteg's blog - AYAD - Project - 2008 04 13 AccessKeys

To accesskey or not to accesskey...

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An accesskey is another of the W3's ways of muddling concerns; when you type something into a web browser, what does it mean? Does the browser get the keystroke or the page, or the form, and which form are we talking about anyway... It seems the prevailing wisdom is not to use accesskeys as the implementations are broken; in a nutshell, this misfeature is not compositional, a feature shared with all the very worst XHTML ideas.

Back in the real world we're stuck between doing something "many users will be familiar with" (yeah, I remember that) and leaving things alone. I've decided to follow the BBC's ambivalent lead here.