Access Keys for Accessibility Purposes – part 1

Alwin Wright   – Phoenix, AZ
123Triad: Web Design & SEO Company

Access Keys for Accessibility Purposes – part 1

Although thefreecountry.com and thesitewizard.com have had access keys support for quite a long time, I have never written about it in any tutorials, or ever drawn attention to their availability. The reason being that I believe access keys are worthless in terms of increasing the accessibility of a site. Before one makes complains, let me explain.

Access Keys

Access keys are usually designed to be a quick interface of the keyboard that webmasters can implement for their websites in order to improve accessibility. Mostly, it is intended to aid people who are disabled in a way. For example, they are meant for those who are blind and must navigate using screen readers or the physically handicapped that their use of the mouse or keyboard is somehow impaired. The access keys map particular characters on the keyboard to specific web page parts or site so that people can use the site with minimum keystrokes.

On thefreecountry.com and thesitewizard.com , at the time this article was wrote, the following access keys were defined:

1 – The Home page key

2 – The Categories /Topics Index key

• 3 – The Site Map key

• 4 – The Search key

• 5 – The Donation Page key

• 6 – The Link to Us key

• 7 – The No Spam Policy key

• 8 – The Privacy Policy key

• 9 – The Feedback Form key

I will clarify that not all the keys above are available on every page. Since an access key is just a convenient method to invoke a link, if the link to a certain page is not present, then its corresponding access key is also naturally missing. For example, at this particular time, the link to the donation page is actually missing from every page on thefreecountry.com, since the link has not been put there. The same applies to some of the other keys and/or pages.

Reasons Access Keys Are Useless

1.    This Concept is flawed

While the basic intention of access keys i.e. to improve accessibility is a laudable one, the concept is fundamentally flawed. There is no good way of implementing it so that it can be actually usable by the end user.

1.   They need to be standardized for them to be Useful

For access keys to be useful to the end user, the actual keys must be standardized across all sites. Otherwise, how will the end users know which keys to use when browsing a particular website? Are you to tire those users, and slow them down even more, by making them to surf to an additional web page only to find out the access keys list that are defined for the particular website? The step where they have to go to a documentation page which lists the access keys for the web site is not worth the time. First, one has to search the entire page in order to discover the link to the access key document. Then he has to click that link so as he can visit that page, read it then memorize the available access keys. What good does all this do? One wants to use access keys to save time, but he has to use a lot of time to find out what the access key is.

2.    They need to be customized for them to be Useful

For access keys to be useful to the end user, the actual keys must be different on each site. Each site has its own purpose, content and structure. Not all websites, want a “Donation” page, or a “Products” listing, for example. If the access keys are made standard, websites will eventually have many access keys which are irrelevant to them. In fact, the only relevant access key to all sites is may be the one which leads to the “Home” page. And I’m sure someone will also dismiss its usefulness.

In other words, standardizing of access keys does not benefit anyone.
Since they need to be standardized for them to be useful, and they can’t be standardized otherwise they will be rendered useless, to me it seems that the entire concept of using access keys was not well thought through.

3.    Very Few Things can be usefully mapped to them

One should look at the way websites have implemented access keys. Most access keys are mapped to standard pages e.g. search box, the main page, feedback form etc.  However, one should ask himself: how many times has he needed to access the site map, the home page, or feedback form? Maybe thesitewizard.com is not a good example, because it is a tutorial site which has lots of people consulting the site map for other articles. But for many sites, how many times has one really needed to go to a site’s site map?

Even if one was to standardize access keys across all sites, the number of things in common which are frequently used on each site is very minimal.

All the websites I have seen simply map access keys to the links and the elements which are common to each page of the site. Frankly, I doubt if it at all does anyone any good.

According to me, it’s far more useful, where accessibility issue is concerned, to improve the interface of the browser keyboard, so that a user can easily hop from one link to another, form field to another, locate text within the page, jump from section to another, activate a link, etc.

123Triad webdesign offers affordable custom website design. Our full service website design company only hires certified website designers. Please contact us today on 1-800-720-0816 for your next web site design project.

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