Developer Corner - Unique Access keys

02 Nov 2020 | Developer Corner

Helen Grimbly
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This week, Support Lead, Helen outlines that access keys should be unique.

F17 - Failure of Success Criterion 1.3.1 and 4.1.1 due to insufficient information in DOM to determine one-to-one relationships (e.g., between labels with same id) in HTML

HTML allows you to define 'access keys', were you associate an HTML element with a keyboard key which will activate that element when pressed. Sitemorse checks that access keys within an HTML page are unique. If there were more than one element with the same access key, then it would be unclear to a browser which element should be triggered.

Example:

F17: Accesskey attribute value 'C' is not unique

<a accesskey="C" href="/Contact/">Contact</a>

<a accesskey="C" href="/Catering/">Catering</a>

Sitemorse will raise an accessibility issue F17 regarding the above access keys, indicating that one of the two references should be removed or changed. Even if the href and the title were the same, the accesskeys can still not be used twice on different elements.

This Accessibility error will affect the Sitemorse score.

Please see the following for more information on this Accessibility error check: https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20140408/F17.html