Accesskey

Continuing my series of user agent b0rk ups, let me address the accesskey attribute of the famous anchor element.

Accesskey allows you to bind a character to a keyboard shortcut. Cool huh? Now I can make my site all accessible!

So lets try the letter F.

Oops. It doesn’t work. Alt+F brings pops up Mozilla’s File menu here.

Hilariously in mobiles with WCSS you can bind keys of the mobile like the Mail access key or the Volume Control key or the Calendar key. In fact any key (device dependent of course). You don’t even need the ALT prefix and you would be assured your web page will override whatever key it was bound to.

So you’re on a web page with all the keys bound to the same page. Where are you going to go?!

It’s like take the battery out to fix the problem mentality here. :)

Your user agent, yes your browser should be clever enough to assign you shortcuts which are useful for your browsing needs. Web authors shouldn’t.