Adding Keyboard Shortcuts to Your Web User Interface
Introduction
If you’re developing web sites that will be used by sporadic visitors, you should focus on content, design, accessibility, and usability. But if your web site serves a community of frequent users (for example, intranet applications), some of those users eventually will want to speed up their working process by replacing mouse clicks with keyboard shortcuts. For example, Google’s Gmail implements a number of keyboard shortcuts that you can use to compose new messages as well as mark, sort, and delete old ones.
After reading this article, you’ll be able to add keyboard shortcuts to your web application, within a single field (similar to the draft-autosave functionality implemented with the Ctrl-S keystroke in Blogger), or within the scope of the whole web page.