Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation

This week’s issue of A List Apart shows you how to clearly but unobtrusively let visitors know which accesskeys correspond with the links on a page. This is the latest in a series of articles I’ve written on improving accessibility with Cascading Style Sheets. Thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman, Erin Kissane, Tanya Rabourn, and Jeff McCartney for all their help.

Revealing Accesskey Info with CSS

The accesskey attribute is a useful feature that allows users to navigate websites via the keyboard instead of a mouse. Unfortunately not knowing what accesskeys are associated with each link makes them of limited value. Revealing Accesskey Info is a new article demonstrating how to use the :before and :after pseudo-elements to selectively display the accesskey assignments to modern web browsers.

The Search for the Missing Link

The Search for the Missing Link is a new article demonstrating how to use CSS pseudo-classes to help users find hard to spot links on an otherwise well designed page. This is something I thought of just this morning, and you’ll need to use the newest version of Mozilla (1.3) to get the full effect!

Update:

Thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman for the link and kind words on his website, and thanks to everyone who sent in feedback on browser support. The technique has been confirmed to work in Opera 7, Safari, and Camino.