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Making Accesskey in FireFox 2.0 Work - Lemuel Cabia

Have you notice that Firefox 2 has some changes in ACCESSKEY and keybinding (keyboard) behaviour? They've changed some specific UI access key defaults to address some problems (with browsers/devices' UI chrome access keys) reported before. Try it with your web site and observe ALT + accesskey will not work anymore.

Some blogs said that you have to press ALT + SHIFT + Accesskey as the new default keyboard function for web content access. I searched some info about this at mozilla knowledge base, and found out some...changes... Anyway, try this.. to change this back to ALT + Accesskey again:

  1. Type/enter "about:config" (no http, no qmark) at the address bar. This will show you all the configuration preferences of your Firefox 2 browser.
  2. Look for the line ui.key.generalAccessKey (you can type this in the filter bar until only this line is visible).
  3. Doubleclick on ui.key.generalAccessKey, and change the integer value -1 (or whatever default value there) to integer 18.
  4. Test it again (no need to restart your browser).

For your example, this website uses Accesskey -> C to go directly to our Contact Us page. Please press "ALT + C" to see if it works. No need to press the Enter key.

According to others, this gives the user/s the option to edit/customize their own keyboard functions for a specific browser.

For more specific info, possible values and their effects, check this out:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Ui.key.generalAccessKey

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Ui.key.chromeAccess

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Ui.key.contentAccess

Update on FireFox 3.0

This instruction also works in the latest version of FireFox. The only difference is that you will see a prior warning screen saying:

This might void your warranty!

Simply click on the "I'll be careful. I promise!" button and off you go.

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