Shawson's Code Blog

I wanted to employ keyboard short cuts to a frequently used internal web app used within the company- Pinch o’ the proverbial piss I thought- I’ll just use access keys! I’ve used them before on front facing sites for accessibility- but when I actually came to document these keys for the users I realised that support across different browsers is a mess;

IE Alt + {key}then hit return
Firefox Alt + Shift + {key}
Chrome Alt + {key} (the most sensible implementation, in my opinion)

IE also seems to refuse to aknowlege the links unless they are currently visible, and as the options I was short cutting existed in drop down menus this was no good, as they existing in bulleted lists which are “display:none” until the user mouses-over the menu bar (using my tiny drop down menu code)!

So to get around this I wrote some jQuery which standardises the short cuts- note this is no good for normal accessibility uses as it’s a new key combo which none of the browsers use, so without documentation no one will know- but for my use on an internal system it’s perfect.

I took the decision to make all the short cuts Ctrl+Alt+{key}, and wanted to keep using the accesskey attribute on my links rather than introduce another mechanism for dictating which keys triggered what- I also wanted to ensure if the link had a javascript onclick handler, instead of navigating away, we respect the handler and simply trigger that. Here’s the code;

$(document).keydown(function(e) {
	if (e.ctrlKey && e.altKey && e.which >= 65 && e.which <= 122) {
		e.preventDefault();
		
		var key = String.fromCharCode(e.which);
		var the_link = $("a[accesskey=" + key.toLowerCase() + "]");
		
		if (typeof(the_link) != 'undefined') {
			// does this link have a javascript assigned click handler, or do we simply send the user to the links href value?
			var events = $.data( $(the_link).get(0), 'events' );
			if (typeof(events) != 'undefined') {
				if (typeof(events.click) != 'undefined') {
					$(the_link).click();
					return;
				}
			}
			window.location = $(the_link).attr('href');
		}
	}
});

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