Keyboard Navigation Plugin

Current version: 1.0 (2003-10-01)

Keynav is a plugin (Browser Helper Object) for Internet Explorer 5.5+ on Windows 2000/ME/XP.
It gives you better keyboard navigation than the tab/shift-tab option IE is born with.

It allows you to navigate links geometrically (up, down, left, right) rather than linearly (next link, previous link) which is the existing option in Internet Explorer.

If you find any bugs, please report them to bugs@mindflow.dk.

Please send me an email to let me know if you want to be notified when Keynav is updated.
Your email will be used for no other purposes than informing you of updates to KeyNav.

Since disclaimers are all the rage on the internet, here we go:

I created this software and I am sharing it with you out of the goodness of my heart. If it breaks something, I am sorry, but it's not my problem.
It should work just fine, but I guarantee nothing.

It's completely free of adware and other evil things.

Thank you.

Download
Instructions
Configuration
Known bugs and limitations
Future plans

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Download

Download KeyNav 1.0

News

Version 1.0 released (added 2003-10-01)

There's a lot of new stuff in it (some of these things are also from 0.8.0, but I haven't mentioned them before):

• Navigation starts from any focused link or form object, regardless of how it was focused. This means you can use tab/shift-tab in conjunction with keynav, if it gets stuck.
• New settings dialog with options (opens with ctrl-f12):
  • Navigate to links outside of viewport
  • Use key repeat (allows you to hold down the arrow keys and have key repeat do the rest)
  • Select combination of qualifiers to use for keynav activation (ctrl/shift/alt/win)
• Improved navigation algorithm
• Vastly improved navigation algorithm performance

Instructions

Press and hold CTRL + ALT + SHIFT once the page has finished loading (when it says "Done" in the status bar).
The first link on the page is hilighted (by default, it's background changes to red).
The focus can now be moved around the links with the arrow keys (while still holding the CTRL + ALT + SHIFT keys).

Letting go of the CTRL + ALT + SHIFT keys removes the hilights, and the focus is now left on the link that you moved the red box to.
Hit "return" to click the link.

Press CTRL + F12 to get the configuration dialog.

Configuration

Press Ctrl-F12 for the settings dialog.

Known bugs and limitations

• Stylesheet popup menus dont work
• It has only been tested to work on Windows XP and Windows 2000 (I have no plan to do anything about this). It should also work in Windows Me and Windows Server 2003, but this has not been tested.
• Windows XP styles disappear from form elements like buttons when changing their background color - this is a bug in IE, as far as I can tell.
• You can not navigate to links on image maps.

Future Plans

• Finetuning of the navigation algorhithm - it's still quirky sometimes
• Windows XP style compatability mode setting
• Different style of marking links, that works for all elements, but doesn't require reflowing of the HTML
• Triggering of mouseover events on the elements in focus
• Focus on the first link in the view port, rather than the first link on the page, if no existing focus
• Optimizations, optimizations, optimizations
• An optional "maximum links for shutoff" function that enables you to set the plugin to not function on pages with more than X links. This is so pages with thousands and thousands of links doesn't eat all your system resources