Re: visibility of 'skip links'

On Monday, May 20, 2002, 8:26:33 AM, Scarlett Julian (ED) wrote:
> I therefore wanted to hide it and attached a css class with
> visibility set to hidden. Does doing this present any problems for the
> people that would benefit from a 'skip links' link. I'm pretty sure that
> screen readers will pick up the hidden link but just wanted to make sure.

This is an interesting one, and something I've been looking into for the past
few days, as I've been testing out aural browsers for Windows.

Sadly most of these are just IE combined with MS Agent (or another voice
engine) - which means pages pay attention to visual styles (if a link is set to
display:none, it won't be read).

On a lot of pages, a "skip to content" link would make no sense on the screen
where the navigation and content are side-by-side - so you really have to hide
it.

I've noticed several sites (including the WAI's own) using a small transparent
gif with the alt text set to "skip navigation" or something similar - but this
seems to me as just a bit of a HTML hack - similar to using pixel gifs for
layout.

So I'm really not sure what to do on this one, I feel like an awful lot of
commercial screen readers are letting web developers who are trying to create
accessible pages down.

-- 
Tom Gilder
tom@tom.me.uk

Received on Monday, 20 May 2002 08:37:56 UTC