is accesskey obsolete?

By anders pearson 16 Jun 2003

folks in the webdesign community today have been linking to and talking about this <a href=”http://www.alistapart.com/stories/accesskeys/“>ALA article</a> about <a href=”http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#adef-accesskey”>accesskey</a>.

i’m all for accessibility for web-pages and applications. but i have to ask if the use of <tt>accesskey</tt> is more or less obviated by mozilla’s “<a href=”http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/typeaheadfind.html”>find as you type</a>” feature.

i hate mice and strongly prefer using the keyboard for as much of my interaction with my computer as possible. until mozilla introduced find as you type, browsing the web was about the only computer activity i engaged in for any substantial amount of time that i actually had to use my mouse for. (<a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/bash.html”>bash</a>, <a href=”http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html”>emacs</a>, and <a href=”http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/“>ion</a> being my other main apps).

now, with find as you type, i almost never need to use the mouse except when i hit the occasional flash site or sites that use graphical elements for navigation in ways that make it difficult to tab to the link i want.

to me, find as you type just looks like a better designed solution to the problem of navigating the web using only the keyboard than <tt>accesskey</tt> does. the big problem with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that it requires webmasters to specifically add it to every site. in mozilla, find as you type <em>just works</em> on <strong>every</strong> site (well, every site that uses text-based links for navigation). no extra development work needed. with <tt>accesskey</tt>, users have to learn a whole new set of shortcuts for each site they visit. that means that designers must somehow provide visual cues for the user to let them know what shortcut is for each link (the ALA article gives some excellent advice on how to do that). find as you type works the same on every site that it works on. another subtle issue with <tt>accesskey</tt> is that someone has to come up with all of the mappings. this leaves a lot of room for overlap and confusion. does ‘h’ mean “home” or “help”? what happens when you have 100 links on a page? do you actually expect a developer to sit down and try to come up with a shortcut for each of them? they certainly aren’t all going to make sense let alone be obvious.

the only big problem with find as you type is that it’s only available to users of late-model mozillas. hopefully that will change someday.

as far as i can tell, just about everything that can be done with <tt>accesskey</tt> can also be done with find as you type and there are far fewer problems. so why do we still care about accesskey?

Tags: usability mozilla accessibility accesskey find as you type keyboard navigation