About Access Keys

Access keys provide shortcuts for moving the cursor to a form field, an area, or a link. Such access can be crucial to people with motor disabilities, but there are other conditions where it could be necessary or useful.

When developing a web document, you can associate the accesskey attribute with the following elements: AREA, BUTTON, INPUT, LABEL, LEGEND, and TEXTAREA.

For example, if you associate the accesskey attribute with a link in a document using accesskey="n" or accesskey="N", the command Alt accesskey (Alt n or Alt N) will activate that link. If you associate the accesskey attribute to a form element, pressing Alt accesskey moves the focus to that element (or to the following element if associated with a LABEL and LEGEND element).

Access keys overwrite Amaya shortcuts. For example, the Amaya Help pages declare these access keys:

• "n" for going to the next page
• "p" for going to the previous page
• "t" for the table of contents

If you have assigned the shortcut Alt-p to an Amaya command, this shortcut won't be accessible when the Amaya Help pages are displayed.

By default, Amaya uses the Alt key as the modifier for access keys. However, you can change this default using theEdit>Preferences>General dialog box. You can choose the Control key instead of the Alt key for a modifier, or you can disable the access keys handler.