HTML access keys were introduced to improve web accessibility and
they still seem to serve that purpose. Wikipedia defines them
as “In a web browser, an access key or accesskey allows a computer user to
immediately jump to a specific part of a web page via the keyboard.” If you
view hover over the link, it should show up in tooltip; for a wikipedia page,
for instance, the ‘view history’ is mapped to ‘alt-shift-h’ by default. In HTML
source, you can see them as accesskey attribute.
Having said that, they can be really annoying many a time. This is true
primarily when you have bound that access key to a mapping in the browser or in
a plugin or even to a global binding (say, with xbindkeys). What makes it even
more worse is that on almost every site it is impossible to disable them.
Continue reading “Annoying access keys on web pages”
