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20030616 Monday June 16, 2003

Add Accesskeys to your webapps Are you a keyboard monkey that hates using your mouse? If so, you can bet your webapp's powerusers feel the same way. How about giving them the power to navigate your app using keyboard shortcuts? It's easy to do by adding an "accesskey" attribute to your links and form elements, but how do you tell your users they exist? Zeldman's got the goods:

In Issue No. 158 of A List Apart, For People Who Make Websites: All your favorite applications have shortcut keys. So can your site, thanks to the XHTML accesskey attribute. Accesskeys make sites more accessible for people who cannot use a mouse. Unfortunately, almost no designer uses accesskeys, because, unless they View Source, most visitors can't tell that you've put these nifty navigational shortcuts to work on your site. In "Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation," Stuart Robertson unlocks the secret of providing visible accesskey shortcuts. Dig in and have fun.

Posted in The Web at Jun 16 2003, 05:42:00 PM MDT 2 Comments

Comments:

For what it's worth, JIRA has supported access keys for a while now and we've expanded support for them in 2.1.

See http://jira.atlassian.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa for an example. All menu items are 'accessible' (new since 2.1) and the username/password box have been accessible for ages.

Rather than a complex CSS solution, we just underline the first character of the link - works well for me :)

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Mike

Posted by Mike Cannon-Brookes on June 16, 2003 at 06:09 PM MDT #

I <em>did</em> notice this on JIRA - very cool. It looks like you need some work on your HTML though. Getting rid of those <font> tags might speed things up a bit (not that JIRA needs it).

Posted by Matt Raible on June 16, 2003 at 06:20 PM MDT #

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