Web Design Glossary...
Accesskey
An accesskey is an XHTML attribute. It is meant to help users who navigating without a pointing device, such as a mouse. Access keys are intended to be a means of specifying a keyboard shortcut for moving to a link, form component or other tabbable object, using the following HTML elements - a, area, button, input, label, legend or textarea. Use of accesskey is controversial. The current opinion of many accessibility experts is that, accesskeys mostly work against accessibility. And because of many conflicts, defining accesskeys seem to be a waste of time unless you are designing for a controlled environment such as an intranet.