Access key

One convention is for the page author to show the access key value by using the tag to underline the letter in the link’s text corresponding to the accesskey assigned.

For the link below, a user would press Alt+H on Internet Explorer, Ctrl+H on a Mac (the command key can give undesired results) and ⇧ Shift+Esc+H on Opera to be directed to index.html.

These users require numerous keyboard shortcuts to access web pages, as “pointing and clicking” a mouse is not an option for them.

Their research showed that most key stroke combinations did in fact present a conflict for one or more of these technologies, and their final recommendation was to avoid using accesskeys altogether.

Subsequently, browsers changed their modifier keys to avoid the conflict, as can be seen in the table above: typically, Alt+⇧ Shift on Windows, and Ctrl + ⌥ Opt on Mac.