Re: Skip Navigation was RE: Access key questions

On 29 Mar 2004, at 02:09, Jim Thatcher wrote:

> The solution for what Steve suggests should be "headings" markup and 
> thus
> headings navigation.

Right

> It is a solution for screen reader users today, but as
> far as I know there is no keyboard value for headings yet.

You can't do it with IE out of the box, but keyboard-friendly browsers 
like Opera have had headings navigation for almost a decade, and one of 
the common script-based add-ons to Explorer and Mozilla (lots of people 
produce these, including Jon Gunderson's group at uiuc, Jim Ley, and 
more recently NILS) for accessibility is indeed keyboard-based headings 
navigation.

> I worry at the
> suggestion of several skip links - it could end up like my favorite 
> example
> of how not to do skip links
> (http://www.jimthatcher.com/whatnot2004/CSUN-WN-8.5.htm) where over 
> half the
> words on the page were skip link words.

I think this demonstrates precisely why the skip links thing is a bit 
of a hack designed to get around the fact that most user agents never 
got the hang of grouping links and passing over them - something that 
was readily available in HTML in the mid-90s (and was implemented in 
early browsers like Lynx). I agree with Jim that having a page which 
grows an extra 15 links which all say "skip this" or something similar 
isn't a huge net win.

Cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Sunday, 28 March 2004 17:09:50 UTC