The use and abuse of AccessKeys

I’ve been meaning to post about the use of AccessKeys on websites now for some time (I wrote the post but never completed the list at the end). Then, this morning I saw a post from Tony Crockford on the WAUK list along similar lines so thought it was time I got the post online :)

Just before Christmas, we were looking for a new house so I was spending an increased amount of time on Rightmove and it really started to bug me. I’m really pleased by the fact that they tried to make their site simpler to navigate by introducing AccessKeys to their pages but in my view they’re defeating the purpose of them by overriding browser shortcuts. In this case, the one I’m referring to is the use of Ctrl+K which I use a lot to access Firefox’s search bar.

Why oh why have they chosen to override this key combination, in IE it’s not too irritating as it doesn’t activate the link, in Firefox however it automatically loads the link, so I’m forever being sent back to the buying homepage.

I can understand that they want to make the key relevant, but what does “K” have to do with buying? I could understand if they were overriding “B” –and it wouldn’t bother me as it’s related, but K? I realise that it’s unpractical to avoid all shortcuts in all browsers but I would have thought they’d look into the main shortcuts first.

I had planned to compile a list of common shortcuts but I’ve not had time yet –another thing on the list ;). What’s interesting however is that since I wrote this post in January, they’ve replaced a couple of the shortcuts already –Buying is now “B”.

So what’s Tony Crockford got to do with this all? Well he referred the list to the WCAG Samurai’s point on AccessKeys which I think is a valid one:

So there you have it, just don’t ;) -I think that now there are so many different browsers out there it’s impossible to account for them all so it’s probably the best methodology.