Giving Buttons and Other Controls Access Characters

The Testing Department is on the phone again. Everyone loves your new program, SuperDuperTextPro, but as usual, there are "one or two little things." And, as usual, one of those things is keyboard access. Ideally, they say, the user should be able to use programs entirely from the keyboard, without the mouse at all. Well, you say, the button's tab order was set correctly (see the next topic). But, they say, what about giving your buttons access characters?

Can you do that? You know you can give menu items access characters-those underlined characters in a menu item that the user can reach with the Alt key. For example, if the File menu's access character is F, the user can open that menu by pressing Alt+F. Can you add access characters to buttons?

Yes you can; just place an ampersand (&) in front of the character in the button's caption. For example, placing & in front of the word Me in Click Me (i.e., Click &Me), makes M the access character for that button. (Be sure that the access character you choose is unique among all the access characters available at one time.)