Sent by Francois Jordaan on 20 September 2004 11:11
The CSS technique we've used lately to display accesskeys is this method
invented (AFAIK) by Tom Gilder:
http://blog.tom.me.uk/2003/09/13/skipadeedoodah.php
We use it to provide a short menu of navigational links, with accesskeys, at
the start of the page. The CSS uses the :focus pseudoclass to make the links
visible when tabbed onto. That way, a sighted user who keyboard-navigates
also benefits from them.
Example:
http://tinyurl.com/6org3
(Turn CSS off to check the full menu.)
The CSS hiding technique doesn't use visibility:hidden or display:none for
the reasons outlined here
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ScreenreaderVisibility
It also doesn't use off-left, but rather this
..skip-link {
position: absolute;
overflow: hidden;
width: 0;
height: 0;
}
It's fair to speculate whether search engines might penalise techniques like
this as hidden text, but (1) I think this requires CSS parsing too complex
for search engine spiders and (2) even if they saw it as hidden text, smart
spiders would evaluate whether or not the hidden text misrepresents the rest
of the page content.
Finally, we're aware of the accesskey problems (clashes with reserved
keystroke recommendations) outlined here,
http://www.wats.ca/articles/accesskeys/19
http://www.wats.ca/resources/accesskeysandkeystrokes/38
On balance, however, we think there are sufficient reasons to continue using
them. Especially as they're still an official UK government [1] and RNIB
recommendation:
[1] http://tinyurl.com/3hmzf [section 2.4.4]
francois
Wheel Group, Beaumont House, Kensington Village, Avonmore Road, London W14
8TS
www.wheel.co.uk
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