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Monday, January 24, 2005

Annoying accesskeys

Here's an annoyance I've stumbled across multiple times. The Nucleus website uses accesskeys for quick access to the menu items. e.g. Alt-D (Alt since I'm on a PC) will bring you to the downloads page.

Fine. So far. But Alt-D is also a browser-independent shortcut to jump to the location bar. "Browser-independent", as it works the same way in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So, my habit of hitting Alt-D constantly causes total confusion when I do it on the Nucleus homepage: Instead of getting the focus on the address bar, the downloads page loads.

So, why not use Ctrl-L? While in Firefox this is exactly the same as Alt-D, in Internet Explorer it isn't. You'll get the "Open Url..." dialog box instead. Close, but not what I want.

Whats the conclusion? The annoyances caused by keyboard shortcuts overruled by accesskeys are a perfectly good reason to NOT use accesskeys at all, or to limit the accesskey use to numeric values. (and even if you do so, try to stick to some standard assignments)

Posted by karma at 20:18:43. Filed under: Thoughts

Comments

I always use <F6> to focus the location bar. This works bot in IE and in FF, and you only have to use one single key :)
In fact <F6> is in both browsers the button to select the next frame, but since well designed websites don't use frames it works very well for me.

Posted by TeRanEX at Monday, January 24, 2005 20:47:23

(oh: i didn't mean, i design good websites, i just meant, that most websites i visite are well designed ;))

Posted by TeRanEX at Monday, January 24, 2005 20:48:08

F6 sounds interesting (and easier to type than Alt-D). But I wonder what it will do on site with frames :(

Posted by karma at Tuesday, January 25, 2005 21:08:31

it will go through all frames until it reaches the location bar :(
Yet another reason why i don't like frames...

Posted by TeRanEX at Tuesday, January 25, 2005 21:14:12

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