accesskey -- what's going on in Firefox 2 and IE?

Used to work in Fx but not IE

[GaryK]

Since the upgrade to Fx 2.0 none of my accesskey properties works. They never worked in IE.

<a href="someURL" title="Some Title Text." accesskey="1">Blue Widgets</a>

The above used to work in Firefox but it never worked in IE.

Now it no longer works in Firefox Version 2.0

Some of my users really need this option.

Am I doing something wrong? Or does accesskey not work in any version of IE and Firefox 2.0?

Thanks.

[penders]

In IE, using the accesskey (ie. [ALT]+[1] in Windows) seems to simply move focus to the link, having to then hit the [ENTER] key to action it. Hhhmmm?! FF1.5 goes that extra step and activates it (which is how it should work, I think, for anchors). For other elements (ie. INPUT) both browsers move focus to the control. Not sure about FF2.0.

[tedster]

This access key issue is actually a major change in FF2 and a major challenge for browsers and legacy websites. Here's a very informative article from the usability/accessibility folks at Juicy Studio.

Firefox 2.0 uses Shift+Alt as the keystroke combination to invoke access keys. On the surface, this appears to be a great idea, as it avoids clashing with the shortcut keys used for the browser. Unfortunately, the new behaviour has been poorly implemented and breaks all websites that have implemented access keys using numeric values, as access keys specified with numeric values cannot be accessed in Firefox 2.0.

[juicystudio.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 6:08 am (utc) on Nov. 3, 2006]

[tedster]

Immediate answer for GaryK (see the article above for details) is that using numerals for the accesskey is problematic.

[Robin_reala]

Well, all of the sites we do conform to UK Govt accesskey recommendations (i.e. nearly all numeric accesskeys) so we'll probably just ride this one out until Mozilla patch this bug and (hopefully) put the fix in a point release.

[GaryK]

I am forever in your debt Ted. That was an excellent and informative link. Thanks. I guess I'll do the same as Robin and wait to see if Fx (and hopefully IE too) adopts the same strategy that Opera uses.