Over four years ago (bloody hell!) I wrote an article called Buttons with Keyboard Shortcut. At the time this was yet another IE-only solutions. While the <button> element was a W3C idea it was Microsoft who first adopted it. It's only now that we can safely use it in web applications, knowing that most browsers support it.

As well as talking about buttons that article talked about keyboard shortcuts using the accesskey attribute. I've been using these shortcuts ever since. This site uses them too. Brian Green noticed the underlined S in the label for the search box, realised Alt+S takes focus there and mailed to say he liked it. Until then I'd presumed everybody has read all of my articles (there's less than 200!) and so knew about this trick. Obviously not.

You have to be careful when using shortcuts though. The trick is to not over-ride the browser's default shortcuts for its menu items. For the main browsers this rules out B, F, E, G, V, A, T, H & D. It's easy enough to avoid using these characters, but what about browsers in countries that don't speak English? It's hard to avoid all conflicts.

The easy way round this is to use numbers. You can get back to this site's homepage at any time by pressing Alt+1 (Ctrl+1 in Safari/Mac). Hover over the codestore logo and there's a hint to this effect in the tooltip. I could easily apply this to my navigation bar at the top of each page. The Blogs link could be Alt+2, Articles Alt+3, Sandbox ALT+4 etc etc. The same method could be applied to almost all sites.

Using buttons and shortcut keys is now safer than it's ever been (although using the accesskeys for the buttons in that article crashes Safari) and I recommend their use. Just be careful how you use shortcut keys!