Accesskeys are Dead, Long Live Access Points

The Future of Accesskeys from Derek Featherstone of WATS.ca makes for some interesting reading... I decided a while ago that accesskeys were poorly implemented - I approve of the UK government's accesskeys system as an attempt to standardise keyboard shortcuts but it's quite limited in it's scope and therefore not incredibly useful. Derek's article highlights the replacement of accesskeys in the XHTML 2.0 spec with 'access points'. This means that the user can define their keyboard shortcut for 'contact' and that combination will work on every site that implements that access point. It's consistent, simple and very far off in the future! At least it's there though... In the meantime, it would appear that the W3C has reached the same conclusions as a number of web developers and dumped access keys. That's that then. Long live access points.

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