[Plone-UI] Accessibility of Plone UI - missuse of accesskey attribute

rjc rjc at MIT.EDU
Wed Mar 23 21:14:39 UTC 2005


I've seen a lot of code like this on the plone pages I've looked at:
        <li id="portaltab-index_html" class="selected">
            <a href="http://plone.org"
               accesskey="accesskeys-tabs">Home</a>
        </li>


The accesskey attribute is meant to assign a single key command to a page element. This element has to be in the tab order (i.e., needs to be a form control or link); other clickable items such as paragraphs with onclick handlers won't work. So, if you want the key "alt+n" to activate a next button, you might do:
<input type="submit" value="Next>" accesskey="n"/>

You could use a link instead of a button, but buttons are nice in this situation because when the accesskey is pressed, the button gains focus and gets a click; if a link (anchor) were used the pressing of the key merely moves focus to the link; one still needs to press enter to activate it.

Access keys use different modifiers depending on which browser/platform your using; mac uses command+letter I think whereas IE-win uses alt+letter.

See the html4.01 specs at www.w3.org for more...


-- Rich Caloggero, MIT Adaptive Tech. for Info. and Computing
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