Web Development
Web Developer Guidelines
Visual Design Recommendations

Checkpoint 2.7 - Mobile-PDA

Access keys have been provided for the main navigation and important functionality (such as Search)

WCAG 1.0 Priority 3

WCAG Guideline 9. Design for device-independence.

Pointing devices such as a mouse are not widely used on mobile devices. To facilitate navigation and create a better user experience, access keys should be attached to main navigation and important links and functionality.

Requirement

Access keys have been provided for the main navigation and important functionality (such as Search)

Recommendation

The same access key must be provided for links that are repeated across pages, such as links to the home page or to search.

Note: No convention exists to map a key to a particular function using access keys. The user will therefore need to be informed as to which key is mapped to which function. This extra instruction takes up some of the limited screen space, so there may be a trade off between use of access keys and the related visual instructions.

Checking Tool

View the page in a browser and verify that main navigation and important functionality can be accessed using access keys. View the source code of the page and look for instances of the accesskey attribute on hyperlinks.

Information Source

The original source of this information is located on the W3C web site  (www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-TECHS/#tech-keyboard-shortcuts)

 

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