Disabling IE8 accelerators for an entire site

Question

(Yes, I know there is a similar question on SO, but it's 8 months old -- since then IE8 RTM has come out -- and not very illuminating)

Is it possible to disable IE8's 'Accelerators' on my site? When highlighting text, I have a small popup box that appears beside the cursor (similar to Office 2007) which is being obstructed by them.

I understand there's a method of disabling highlighting on specific elements of the site using jQuery, but this isn't ideal as I need to preserve the highlighting.

Note: I am not asking how to disable IE8 accelerators on my local copy of Internet Explorer. Instead, I would like accelerators to not appear when anyone visits my site using IE8.

Answer 1

You could prevent highlighting on the section. Then wrap the selection that would have been highlighted in a span that has some CSS applied to it, mimicking the highlight. It might take a bit of work, but it would achieve your goals.

Answer 2

You can mark the parent element as either contentEditable (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537837%28VS.85%29.aspx) or as unselectable (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms537840%28VS.85%29.aspx)

Either one should prevent the accelerator button from appearing.

Answer 3

Sorry, this is deliberately not supported.

Please see http://blogs.msdn.com/ieinternals/archive/2009/06/03/slowing-down-disabling-accelerators.aspx for discussion on this topic.