The position of the special characters depends on the language of the keyboard, so that might have an effect on which key gives which code. For example the Finnish keyboard has / (backslash) where this code presents ' (semicolon), and American keyboards naturally don't have å, ä or ö. You should keep in mind that hard-coding the positions of the special characters is language dependent. Think of it like this: Javascript can only determine "this is the 13th key on the second row on the keyboard", it can't tell what character is actually printed on that key.