Significance of Accessibility
Significance of Accessibility
The AccessKey pad will not work with the default settings in Forefox 2. The reason for this is that this bro0wser requires the Alt and Shift keys to be pressed simultaneously with the access key. Of course this leads to the upper case character code of the keys. On German keyboards, Shift+2 delivers a quotation mark.
We wrote a small JavaScript to bypass this mishap and which you can include on your pages, should you be using numbers as access keys.
The script tries to recognize Firefox 2 and then goes on to check whether alt and shift keys are pressed. Should a number additionally be pressed on the keyboard, the script will follow the link with a corresponding accesskey attribute.
JavaScript download ff2_accesskey.js (ZIP).
To enable a link to be called up immediately on Internet Explorer, integrating a JavaScript by Jörn Hofer on your pages is a useful step. This has the effect that the keyboard on Internet Explorer is used in the same way as on Mozilla and Netscape browsers.
The script checks whether the key Alt is pressed. If Alt is pressed, the script verifies whether any of the numbers 0 to 9 are also pressed. As this key combination in Internet Explorer leads to the focusing of links, the browser can be redirected dynamically.
JavaScript download keypress.js (ZIP).
This JavaScript is only useful for Internet Explorer. On this account, the JavaScript should only be loaded onto these browsers. The script should be included as follows:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
...
<title>Page title</title>
<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<script src="keypress.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif]-->
...
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>
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Accessible web design
