One of my goals for Clagnut is to make it accessible beyond good alttags and valid
code. It currently passes WCAG 1.0 Priority
1 and Section 508. To achieve this, a skip
navigation link (skip
nav) is required. To make skip nav (and other essential navigation) more effective, we should provide keyboard shortcuts through the accesskey attribute.
For example:
<a
href="#content" accesskey="2">skip nav</a>
This allows visitors to press ALT+2 or CTRL+2 (on
Windows and Macs respectively) to move focus straight to the anchor in question. Keyboard shortcuts can also be applied to form controls by adding accesskeyattributes
to input tags
in the same way.
It’s also helpful to add keyboard shortcuts for other important parts of the site, such as search, help, home page and the page which lists the keyboard shortcuts. It struck me that there should be consistency in access keys across the Web. I couldn’t find
any mention of standards or suggestions on theSection
508 or WAI sites,
so I attempted to see if a de facto standard has been adopted none-the-less.
The UK Government
provides accessibility
guidelines to which all its websites should comply. These guidelines state:
| Access key | Target |
|---|---|
| S | Skip navigation |
| 1 | Home page |
| 2 | What’s new |
| 3 | Site map |
| 4 | Search |
| 5 | FAQs |
| 6 | Help |
| 7 | Complaints procedure |
| 8 | Terms and conditions |
| 9 | Feedback form |
| 0 | Access key details |
WebAIM provides
similar shortcuts:
| Access key | Target |
|---|---|
| 1 | Home page |
| 2 | Skip navigation |
| 3 | Printer-friendly version |
| 4 | Search |
These almost match with the access
keys used by Mark Pilgrim (accessibility evangelist):
| Access key | Target |
|---|---|
| 1 | Home page |
| 2 | Skip navigation |
| 4 | Search |
| 0 | Access key details |
And finally, the accessibility magazine Made
For All uses a few different shortcuts:
| Access key | Target | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Home page | |
| 2 | News | |
| 3 | Previous issues | |
| 4 | Resources | |
| 5 | About | |
|
|