Is there any way to avoid taking my hands off the keyboard, and having to reach for the mouse to add the state abbreviation when the site uses the drop down box of states, rather than allowing me to simply type it in?
I know it’s a small thing, but when I am doing a lot of it, it’s annoying as hell.
If you’re using tab to jump from field to field, you tab to the state drop down and then push the first letter of your state. If there is more than one state starting with that letter, keep hitting the letter and it should advance through the list. So for WI I usually have to hit W three times, I think.
This generally works in my experience, though I usually use the down arrow if I need to scroll through the list of choices.
And it always makes me glad I live in California, and not Connecticut or Colorado 
WWW almost always takes me to Wisconsin.
Also, any time tab takes you from one field to the next, Shift+Tab will go backwards. Helpful when you need to fix a typo.
I used Chrome for a little while, and I noticed it was better than other browsers at holding form information. So I would just tab through the form, and watch my typical answer appear. There may be plugins for other browsers to add that functionality.
Once you use a letter to jump to the first state starting with that letter you an also use up & down arrows to move in either direction.
I used to live in MO. With so many M-states it was quicker to type N UpArrow UpArrow versus typing MMMMMMMMMM oops UpArrow.
It’s real easy now that I’m in in FL. Warm too.
Texas only requires ‘TT’.
Pennsylvania only requires a single P. Except when they’ve added Palau. Damn you, Palau! You make twice as much work for me!
But sometimes web designers will make a fancy-looking list of states that doesn’t respond to keyboard controls, and must be selected by mouse. They should all be given one-way tickets to Palau.
Another one to watch out for is when they use the state names for the list as that will throw off attempts to just tab to the field and hit a letter. One example of this is North Carolina and Nebraska flip-flopping in order. (Neb… comes before Nor…, but NC is before NE.)
This is especially annoying because the list isn’t consistent between websites, so for many of the ‘M’ states, it isn’t the same number of M’s to key – you have to check on each website.
Note that nearly all of these take more keystrokes (or as many) than just typing the 2-letter state abbreviation. Which people all know for their own address.
It’s an indication of incompetent (or lazy) web designers. They should accept the 2-letter abbreviation, than invisibly run it through a edit to check that it’s a valid code. But that takes work on the part of the designer, while they can just include the table lookup widget and put the work onto the user.
Equally annoying are websites that make you enter city, state, and then zipcode, when they could just ask for zipcode alone and figure out the city & state from that.
What are even more annoying are outfits that are still using the 2-letter code list from before the 1980s. PR, AA, AP, TT, etc. are real USPS codes. It’s pretty sad, anyway, to be using a list that was out of date before the Internet and personal computers became popular.
What annoys me is that I know the states in alphabetical order but the form lists the states alpha by 2-letter postal code, so North Dakota comes before Nevada, and NC and ND come at the top, instead of the bottom, of the list of N states. An amazing number of people do not know the postal codes, and think Nebraska is NB and that AK is Arkansas and AR is Arizona.
I already mentioned Missouri (MO). Whenever I’d give my address over the phone to some customer service / data entry drone that’s how I’d say it: “MIZZ-ur-ee that’s emm oh.”
I started doing that shortly after moving there and having all sorts of problems with address changes going to other states. Fortunately I lived in a big city with an easily recognized name so the PO could eventually reroute the mail to me. This was all pre-internet & pre- easy real-time address verification.