An accesskey is an XHTML attribute. It is meant to help users who navigating without a pointing device, such as a mouse. Access keys are intended to be a means of specifying a keyboard shortcut for moving to a link, form component or other tabbable object, using the following HTML elements - a , area , button , input , label , legend or textarea . Use of accesskey is controversial. The current opinion of many accessibility experts is that, accesskeys mostly work against accessibility. And because of many conflicts, defining accesskeys seem to be a waste of time unless you are designing for a controlled environment such as an intranet.