Safari Access Keys
Many popular sites (e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook, XKCD, etc.) support keyboard shortcut commands using the HTML accesskey attribute. These are great, both for people with any disabilities preventing them from using a mouse and for power users who like using the keyboard to navigate faster. Unfortunately, these shortcuts are not always easy to find. Wikipedia, for example, only shows these commmands if you hover over a link.
This extension for Apple's Safari browser displays the shortcuts for the current site in a toolbar for easy access. The commands are accessed by pressing control+option+[the displayed letter] on a Mac or alt+[displayed letter] on Windows.
Download Safari Access Keys extension - Current version: 1.2, updated July 30, 2010
How to enable Access Keys on your site
Add the accesskey attribute to the desired element in your HTML code. E.g. the HTML code <a href="http://example.com" accesskey="x">Example</a> would mean that control+alt+x would take the user to example.com.
Note that these access keys do not require Safari nor this extension. They work in virtually all browsers and are part of the HTML standard; this extension merely displays them.
Changelog:
1.2
- Added an option to automatically hide the toolbar when the page does not have shortcuts. This can be turned on/off in the preferences.
1.1.4
- Adjusted the logic for figuring out the name of a key command; now uses the HTML value attribute when applicable
1.1.3
- If there are multiple elements on the page with the same key command, only one is shown; this prevents duplicate commands on XKCD.com
1.1
- Now truncates commands if there are likely to be too many to fit. You can hover over the command to see the full text.
- No more commands that don't have labels in most cases. Email me if you still encounter this.
- Formatted HTML no longer shows up in the toolbar on some websites.
- For some strange reason, lots of sites (Apple, Facebook, etc) name their search box "q" (as opposed to, say, "search"). This extension automatically interprets this.
There are a few known issues (which will be fixed soon):
- On sites with lots of access key commands (Wikipedia), the bar is cut off. Update: I've improved this in recent versions, but it still might get cut off occasionally.
