Skipping Navigation

Thank you for the work on redesign of the W3 home page. I am delighted
to see the result of a CSS rendered page. It displays well. I find the
page very usable. 

I do have an accessibility comment.

I am using Window-Eyes 4.2 in conjunction with IE 5.5 running on Windows
2000 Professional.

The screen reader does not verbalize this snippet placed at the top of
the left-side div containing navigation links:

<li><a class="navlink" title="Skip W3C A-Z" href="#news">Skip to
News</a></li>

I have used the following construct, when wanting to provide a skip
link:

<a href="#foo"><img src="images/transparent.gif" width="1" height="1"
alt="Skip navigation and go to foo." /></a>

When I put that into a block-level element and class the element to have
no border, I find that each of NN4+  and IE5+ display nothing, or at
least nothing that affects screen display, and that Window-Eyes will
verbalize the alt property/value of <img>. 

http://www.loc.gov/nls/index.html provides and example.

It may be that I am not using Window-Eyes to its best advantage. I
believe, however, that Window-Eyes is either not designed to read title
properties, or that I can set it to read title properties and have
failed to do so. 

At any rate, I am thinking that the class, .navlink, has either display:
none or visibility: hidden as a declaration. Since the <li> element that
contains the skip link is not rendered, it is not available to the
screen reader.

Tom Martin
tmar@loc.gov