Sent by Laura Carlson on 15 July 2004 18:06
> As a matter of interest is it good or bad practice to have an access
> key for every navigation link of the menu or just the home and
> contact pages?
>From what I have gathered best practice is that IF accesskeys are used:
- Keep the number of accesskeys to a minimum.
- 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.
However, because of the many conflicts, defining accesskeys seems 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, John Foliot and Derek Featherstone have conducted an
unofficial survey/research and 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 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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