Using the keyboard for special characters

Adrian Cooke — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:04:12 +0000

This is to make my life easier; maybe it will help occasional others. There are some comprehensive tables available out there covering the full range of special characters,^† but these are the ones I’m always asked about by web content editors when their browsers retch up freakout boxes. This is also comes up when working with text in Photoshop, and writing in text input fields on Delicious and Twitter, hence the OS-based keystroke combinations.

Using the keyboard to produce certain special characters
Character	Mac keystrokes	Windows keystrokes	HTML name and number references
Left single quotation mark (‘)	option + ]	alt + 0145	`‘`	`‘`
Right single quotation mark (’)	option + shift + ]	alt + 0146	`’`	`’`
Left double quotation mark (“)	option + [	alt + 0147	`“`	`“`
Right double quotation mark (”)	option + shift + [	alt + 0148	`”`	`”`
En dash (–)	option + hyphen	alt + 0150	`–`	`–`
Em dash (—)	option + shift + hyphen	alt + 0151	`—`	`—`
Lowercase a with acute accent (á)	(option + e) + a	alt + 0225	`á`	`á`
Lowercase e with acute accent (é)	(option + e) + e	alt + 0233	`é`	`ß`
Lowercase e with grave accent (è)	(option + `) + e	alt + 0232	`è`	`è`
Lowercase u with umlaut (ü)	(option + u) + u	alt + 0252	`ü`	`Ü`

† See for example the W3C’s Character entity references in HTML 4, this multiplatform table of keyboard shortcuts for special characters, this comparison of Mac OS X and Windows XP keyboard functions, and this table of Windows alt code references (PDF file).

Links: captioning, accessibility, reading, etc.

Adrian Cooke — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:28:19 +0000

This is how the web gets regulated #: Timely article on A List Apart by Joe Clark about the (appalling) state of captioning on the web, and the possibility of a legislative requirement soon in Canada and Australia. It’s pretty dismal currently despite the fact that WCAG+Samurai and WCAG 2.0 require (yes) captioning for video. He mentions, and criticises, YouTube’s closed captioning model.
Blue Beanie Day II #: Blue Beanie Day II is coming up. Show your support for web standards and accessibility by wearing a blue beanie on Friday, November 28, wherever you lurk on the web. Here’s some photos from the inaugural BBD last year.
The 100% easy-2-read standard #: Another touchstone article about usability and web text by Oliver Reichenstein, author of the reasonably infamous “Web Design is 95% Typography” essay. This one is just as thoughtful, more practical and very easy to read :P (Via Joe Clark.)
Notepad++ and E Text Editor #: I’m looking for a Windows text editor for occasional use on my work PC. According to a couple of Mac-to-Windows switcher threads on Ask MeFi, Notepad++ (free, donations accepted) is pretty popular. E Text Editor, “the power of TextMate on Windows,” looks pretty nice in the promo video, especially the way that code completion works in HTML mode (US$35).
Some thoughtful UI on ffffound.com #: Ryan Singer looks at Ffffound’s use of keyboard shortcuts to navigate images on the site. “J” skips you down the page to the next image, “K” back up, and if you get to the end of the page the same key requests the next or previous page instead. Rad. (Via John Gruber, who notes that the same shortcuts work within posts on The Big Picture.)
Social Media Classroom #: SMC is a Drupal application that provides a set of tools for web-based collaboration (wikis, blogs, media collections, Twitter and Delicious integration). It was developed by Howard Rheingold with the goal of increasing and facilitating media literacy. It looks like it would make Drupal an even better tool for communities who need to meet and work together online. My friend Brian Christiansen worked on the UI.

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Using the keyboard for special characters

Links: captioning, accessibility, reading, etc.