Keyboard Accessibility (Home Office Design System)
The UK Home Office’s design-system guidance on keyboard interaction, covering both general keyboard navigation and its dedicated page on character-key shortcuts specifically.
License: Open Government Licence v3.0 — same basis as Loading Spinner (Home Office Design System). Inferred from the UK central-government default rather than a per-page statement.
Key points
- Single unmodified character-key shortcuts (pressing “S” alone, say) are easy to trigger unintentionally — a stray keystroke, a misclick, or, for a user of speech-to-text software, a spoken word that happens to match the shortcut character firing an action nobody meant to invoke.
- A shortcut combining two or more concurrent key presses is far less prone to this kind of accidental trigger than a single character key.
- Where a single-character shortcut already exists, either remap it to a multi-key combination or make it possible to disable if it doesn’t add enough value to justify the risk.
- General keyboard-access basics beyond shortcuts specifically: every interactive element must be reachable via Tab, indicate clear focus when selected, and be activatable by keyboard; a “skip to content” link should appear within the first few tab stops; keyboard focus should never be trapped inside a region of content with no way out.