Glossary · Accessibility term
Keyboard shortcut
A keyboard shortcut is a second, faster route to something a page can already do, and the accessibility rule covers one narrow kind of it. Take a shortcut a page builds out of printable characters alone, meaning letters, numbers, punctuation or symbols, such as pressing s to open search. It has to be switchable off, remappable to something that includes a non-printable key, or live only while the relevant control has focus. The reason is speech input. Speech recognition software turns what somebody says into text and delivers that text as keystrokes. A person dictating into a field is emitting the very characters your shortcut is listening for. A stray s fires the command instead of typing a letter. Two things surprise people. Holding Shift to type the character does not get you out, because what the rule matches is the character rather than the keys that produced it, so a question mark shortcut is caught on any layout where the question mark needs Shift. And it covers sequences, so pressing g and then a in quick succession is caught by the same rule, which catches the teams who chose two-key sequences believing they were the safe option.
In practice
Three ways out and they are not equal. Turning shortcuts off is the cheapest and it costs the people who liked them. Remapping is the better answer, and the condition on it is specific, since a remapped shortcut has to include a non-printable key. Moving the search shortcut from s to d fixes nothing. Moving it to something holding Ctrl or Alt does, and it pays to pick a combination the browser has not already claimed for itself. Making it live only while a component has focus is the most work and the best result on a complex application. It keeps the shortcut where it is useful and switches it off everywhere else.
Some things that look caught are not. Typing a letter in a select or a listbox to jump to a matching option is normal control behaviour and outside the rule. Access keys are generally outside it too, because browsers activate them with modifiers. The rule is about shortcuts a page invents, not about the ones the platform already provides.
Modifiers are less clean than they sound. An exit needs a key that prints nothing at all, which in practice means Ctrl, Alt or the platform key. Shift is not one of those, and the rule closes that door itself by naming upper case letters alongside lower case ones. AltGr fails the same test on the layouts where it is simply how a symbol gets typed.
Why it matters
This rule exists because of one recurring failure a team never sees, since it only shows up for people using an input method nobody on the team uses. Somebody dictating a message triggers a delete, a star, a jump to search, cannot work out why, and cannot stop it. It is also cheap to satisfy. A settings toggle does it, and the remapping route tends to earn its keep with everybody, because power users want their own bindings anyway. Ship the toggle.
The single-key trap
A support inbox maps r to reply, d to delete and s to star. Somebody dictating a reply says a word, the software sends the letters, and the message is starred, then deleted, then a reply window opens on top of the draft. Nothing was clicked and nothing looks broken from the outside.
Where this shows up on the site
Related terms
- Keyboard accessibilityKeyboard accessibility means every piece of functionality on the page can be operated through a keyboard interface.
- Voice controlVoice control means operating a computer by speaking, saying things like "click Submit" or "scroll down", and it is built into macOS, iOS, Windows and Android.
- Switch deviceA switch device is an input for people with severely limited movement, and the picture most people have is a single large button pressed with a hand, head or knee.
- OperableOperable is the second WCAG principle, and its one-line statement is that user interface components and navigation must be operable.
- Pointer gestureA pointer gesture is a touch or mouse action where the path your finger takes matters, or where more than one finger is on the screen at once.
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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