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I have little tooltip graphics, each with a picture of a keyboard shortcut. Sometimes, the picture is a F5, a F10, etc.

I was wondering (for accessibility reasons) if everyone has a keyboard with "F" shortcuts. Maybe in some other language it's C1, C2, ..., C12.

What about Ctrl, Cmd, Esc, etc. ?

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  • I suggest you read about the difference between key-codes and char-codes. Not really a UX issue, btw. Oct 20, 2011 at 14:21
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    I disagree: This is a UX issue. The question is basically: "Does displaying a specific piece of terminology negatively impact the usability of the site?" which is a valid question.
    – JonW
    Oct 20, 2011 at 16:30
  • While I was studying abroad in Japan, I noticed that the F1-12 keys were labeled as such. From some brief image searching on google, it seems that any keyboard that contains the function keys has them labeled as f1-12.
    – zzzzBov
    Oct 20, 2011 at 19:44
  • I read that you tag it as accessibility issue so I would ask to you a simple thing off-topic: These images have the method Title in its <img> tag? If not this is an issue for blind persons! Dec 7, 2011 at 16:48

2 Answers 2

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It's not really depending on the language layout, but more to the computer system you are using. Here's a list of computer systems and their relation to function keys:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_key

I think that on a regular Windows PC you can safely assume that the function keys are there.

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Function is such a common "international" word, that it's always begins with F, even in such a strange language, like Hungarian: it's funkció, where the accented o is a long o (ooh). Alt is the same story. Ctrl is also common, in Hungarian keyboard, it's Ctrl too, but Germans use Strg for Ctrl.

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