Access Denied - Firefox 2.0 breaks access keys on the PC

By David Cummings

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 8:48am

My guys and I were excited to get our hands on Firefox 2.0 final once we saw the announcement of the OFFICIAL release come across our screen on Digg. After quickly downloading it to our file server and sending an email link out to the team, I installed the software to begin testing Cascade Server, our content management system. Only then did I notice something was wrong. Very wrong.

The Problem

Upon installing Firefox 2.0, I immediately noticed the slightly updated interface – subtle changes like tabs having 'X's directly on them upon mouse over to close as opposed to on the far right. It was only when I went into Cascade Server that I noticed something was remiss. I browsed around the application on a demo server to try to visit as many screens as possible with my mouse. When I decided to use access keys, like I normally do, things fell apart. Access keys are designed to be keyboard shortcuts for persons with disabilities as well as power users that look for ways to improve their proficiency in an application. Basically, you click Alt (or Ctrl on a Mac) plus a letter or number and it is equivalent to clicking a link, where applicable, on certain websites and web applications.

When the access keys didn't work, I immediately thought something was wrong with the web application. So, naturally, I did a quick "view source" on the page and doubled-checked the code on the page. Sure enough, the "accesskey" attribute was present in the anchor link tag. With the access key not working, I figured there might be a JavaScript error. Nope, nothing there. All the equivalent mouse clicks for links and form fields worked fine. Something was wrong with Firefox 2.0.

Firefox 2.0 doesn't actually break access keys, as was originally thought. Rather, the Firefox developers fixed a different bug that was four years old and decided to change access keys from Alt plus the number/letter to Alt plus Shift plus the number/letter. Big difference. Several issues arise with this:

• Accessibility - Persons with limited motor skills are going to have a harder time clicking three keys at once (e.g. Alt+Shift+S to save) as opposed to two (e.g. Alt+S to save)

• Power users - Power users that are accustomed to using the shortcut keys in a variety of apps like Cascade Server and SugarCRM are going to think the software is broken only to eventually find out Firefox requires and extra "Shift". I predict a good number of trouble tickets will be created for different web application companies and organizations reporting broken access keys.

• Alt+S - The famous Alt+S to submit a form on a forum and other applications will no longer work. The Alt+S controversy was heavily discussed on a MozillaZine thread.

• Platform consistency - Access keys are now even more inconsistent between the Mac and PC. Before you clicked Ctrl on the Mac and Alt on the PC. Now it is still Ctrl on the Mac (they didn't add the Shift requirement for the platform – I know, I checked with Bradley on his Mac Pro) and Alt+Shift on the PC. That's a big difference if you want to casually switch between the two.

The Solution

Thankfully, the MozillaZine thread also provides the solution. According to "stonedyak", you just need to do "about:config" in Firefox and change "ui.key.contentAccess" to "4". That's it. I believe someone will come up with a quick Firefox extension to provide more control over this. It'll be interesting to see how things play out.

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