The Lightbox effect is showing up pretty much everywhere on the web these days. There are approximately one million different implementations that basically do the same thing: when the user clicks on an image, the screen is dimmed and a larger version of the image is displayed until the user closes it by clicking a ”Close” link or icon.

Many people love this effect, and it definitely can be very useful. There are some problems though. One, which Jonathan Christopher talks about in The Trouble with Lightbox (and its Variants), is that most lightboxes break the back button. Another is keyboard accessibility.

Lightboxes can be very annoying to people who do not use a mouse. The problem with keyboard accessibility isn’t launching lightboxes. That part usually works well. But after that the trouble starts.

Once you’ve launched a lightbox there are a variety of ways to interact with them. Some seem to ignore keyboard input, others let you close them by pressing the Escape key. Sometimes you can step through images in a slideshow by using the left and right arrows, som