Alternate Alt-Key Behaviors Drive Me Mad

May 11, 2006 7:45 AM

Web page access keys are driving me crazy! How can I turn them off?

I'm using Firefox on XP. I visit numerous web sites which have implemented their own accesskey shortcuts. Some of them do it the way Wikipedia does. It drives me crazy because it overrides the Windows keyboard shortcuts. I keep typing Alt-E to bring up the "Edit" menu (like I do in other Windows apps) and it takes me to the Wikipedia editing page. Arrrgh!

I understand that, for the Wikipedia, I can edit that user.js file to disable this. However, other sites also use this wiki software, and I don't want to have to do this for every site. Some other sites also implement their own accesskeys without giving me a way to turn them off.

Is there a setting in Firefox that I can set to prevent this from happening? Or maybe an extension that I can download? I tried searching at Mozilla, and I found extensions to create my own keyboard shortcuts, but that's not what I want to do -- I just want to keep the ones that are already there, without having them changed arbitrarily by whatever web site I'm visiting.

posted by Robert Angelo to technology (5 comments total)

Pressing Alt and then E avoids triggering accesskeys (as opposed to holding down Alt and E), and does bring up the Edit menu in Firefox.
posted by matthewr at 7:51 AM on May 11, 2006

I believe (not 100% certain) the relevant fix is this one.

If that doesn't work, and the sites in question are linking to their access key scripts as external files (i.e. <script src="accesskeys.js">), you could install the AdBlock extension and selectively block that .js file.
posted by Danelope at 7:54 AM on May 11, 2006

I've been having the same problem with the New Scientist web site, which has assigned Alt+S to send you to a subscription page (hijacking it from activating my Sage extension).

Changing the about:config setting and even Adblocking all of the scripts on the page were unsuccessful in stopping the action.

Changing the about:config setting did turn off the behavior, but only until I restarted FF. Even though the setting was unchanged on restart, hotkeys still did their thing. However, if I turned it on and then back off at the beginning of a session, the hotkeys would be deactivated again. Even so, FF would still steal focus, so instead of activating Sage, Alt+S simply did nothing.

(I tested both of these solutions with Wikipedia and got the same unfortunate result.)

I wasn't able to find anything that worked.
posted by camcgee at 8:34 AM on May 11, 2006

Danelope's fix worked for me for the Alt-E combination. The Alt-F combination is still wonky, but I can live with that.

Thanks!
posted by Robert Angelo at 8:39 AM on May 11, 2006

Changing the about:config setting did turn off the behavior, but only until I restarted FF.

If you want to save the settings that you can change in about:config then edit (or create) the file PROFILE_DIR/user.js and add (or change) lines like:

user_pref("NAME_OF_SETTING", VALUE);

So for this particular setting try:

user_pref("accessibility.accesskeycausesactivation", false);

Now when you save that file & restart FF the setting should be saved.

More info at mozilla.org here.
posted by ajbw at 4:55 PM on May 11, 2006