- From: Jim Thatcher <jim@jimthatcher.com>
- Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 10:35:29 -0500
- To: "'Vicente Luque Centeno'" <vlc@it.uc3m.es>, <public-comments-wcag20@w3.org>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>, "'Fentress, Robert'" <rfentres@vt.edu>
There is a detailed discussion of skip navigation techniques that resulted from an action item in the Techniques task group. See [1] with the supper subject "Revised" - sorry about that. There is a test page with various techniques at [2] and a table as to which techniques work with which browsers and assistive technologies. If anybody has any alterations in that table, I would love to know about it. The big issue for skip links is, in my opinion, whether they work with the keyboard. That means that not only the visual focus follows when you activate the skip link, but also input focus. That means that the next tab takes the user to the first link after the target of the skip link. The most common skip link technique is providing a link to an empty named anchor <a name="content"><a> or <a id="content"><a> or even <a id="content" />. That technique does NOT work in IE6 with the keyboard as one of the first skip links at http://wwww.acb.org illustrates. (Remember to tab one more time after executing the skip link.) However I have come up with a counter example to that statement. http://westciv.com has a visible skip link at the top of the page. The target is an empty anchor. It works from the keyboard. To make matters worse, when I saved westciv.com locally without their style sheet, the skip link did not work with the keyboard - which I would predict. When I downloaded the style sheet and attached it - the skip link did work - which baffles me. This is a mystery to me and if anyone can figure it out - I would love to here. A asked the folks at westciv.com if they had any idea and they suggested reading Joe Clark's Book (the answer is not there). I know about the recommendation for using a map element to group links in the WCAG 1.0 techniques document and I probably should have mentioned it in [1], but, though it does group links, there is no user agent that I know of that provides navigation over the map - which is the whole point. You have added a skip link to the navigation map - whether it will work with the keyboard is the big question in [1]. Your second approach <blockquote> <body> <div title="Navigation Bar"> <span class="skip"> [<a href="#how">Bypass navigation bar</a>] </span> [<a href="home.html">Home</a>] [<a href="search.html">Search</a>] [<a href="new.html">New and highlighted</a>] [<a href="sitemap.html">Site map</a>] </div> <h1><a id="how">How to use our site</a></h1> <!-- content of page --> </body> and the following CSS rule: .skip {display:none} /* for not no be shown in graphical browsers */ </blockquote> is doomed to failure because the property display:none hides the link from exactly those users that you were trying to accommodate. [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2004AprJun/0769.html. [2] http://jimthatcher.com/test/skipnavtest.htm. Jim Accessibility, What Not to do: http://jimthatcher.com/whatnot.htm. Web Accessibility Tutorial: http://jimthatcher.com/webcourse1.htm.
Received on Monday, 5 July 2004 11:36:05 UTC