Instead of defining "keystrokes" with the accesskey attribute, the XHTML 2.0 Working Draft (July 22, 2004) takes a big step forward to addressing the issues with accesskeys by dropping the accesskey attribute and introducing the access attribute [...]

This significant change means a few things:

1. Authors will no longer have to worry about keystroke conflicts because it is no longer their job to define keystrokes. Authors will also need to adjust to the fact that they no longer have control.
2. Authors can focus on defining logical and meaningful access points in their documents
3. Users that really need and could benefit from this functionality can define their own keystrokes, eliminating/minimizing conflict with their software.
4. Users get consistency across sites because the keystrokes are defined at the browser level. No more remembering what keystrokes do what on which sites.