Mnemonics (keyboard)

Firefox 3.0 menu with shortcuts highlighted with green and mnemonics highlighted with yellow.

A mnemonic is an underlined alphanumeric character, typically appearing in a menu title, menu item, or the text of a button or component of the user interface. A mnemonic indicates to the user which key to press (in conjunction with the Alt key) to activate a command or navigate to a component.

In Microsoft Windows, mnemonics are called "Access keys". In Web browsers, Access keys may or may not be engaged by the Alt key.

Using mnemonics is limited to entering the underlined character with a single key stroke; for this reason, localized versions of software omit letters with diacritics that need to be input via an extra dead key stroke.

See also

• Keyboard shortcut

External links

• SUN's definition of mnemonic term
• Keyboard shortcuts and mnemonics or accelerators are not the same thing
• Mnemonics (keyboard) (book)