I agree that this approach has accessibility implications. Depending on how its implemented and the user intent it can make things either harder or easier. Perhaps, we need a standard key to enable a user to toggle off a page overriding the browser shortcuts. This could either be built into browsers, defined as a standard by the W3C or incorporated into JQuery and other common libraries. The first approach would probably be the best , but also the most unlikely. Maybe the WHATWG would like to take this up, though they may consider it independent of HTML standards.