Keyboard shortcuts and mnemonics or accelerators are not the same thing!
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Over the time I've found that there are misunderstandings between the concept of the keyboard shortcuts</strong> and mnemonics</strong>. I will try to clarify this problem because the differences are important specially from the point of view of software localization. [caption id="attachment_125" align="alignright" width="260" caption="Keyboard shortcuts in green and mnemonics in yellow."]<img class="size-full wp-image-125" src="http://wp.sbarnea.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/keyboard_shortcuts_mnemonics.png" alt="Keyboard shortcuts in green and mnemonics in yellow." width="260" height="288" />[/caption] The best keyboard related definition I've found for mnemonic it was on Sun Java glossary</a>: mnemonic</strong> - An underlined alphanumeric character, typically in a menu title, menu item, or the text of a button or component. A mnemonic shows the user which key to press (in conjunction with the Alt key) to activate a command or navigate to a component.</blockquote> If you are wondering why it's important to clearly distinguish between them: it's because the mnemonics are changing when the UI language is localized but the keyboard shortcuts are not supposed to be localized</a>.
If you had Win32 experience you may call them "menu accelerators". They define the letter used for triggering them by using Ampersand (&) inside the menu text. I would not recommend the usage of "accelerator" term because looking over the net I've found that in many cases it does refer to keyboard shortcuts.
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