Re: Skip Navigation was RE: Access key questions

If you have that much to skip, perhaps it needs its own page.  If you need a 
long page, you need link groupings as long as it is necessary to use a 
keyboard in a crippled user agent that is the most accessible around for 
screen reader users.  We are a small minority, but on the other hand, making 
things tabable does not hurt anyone.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@sidar.org>
To: "Jim Thatcher" <jim@jimthatcher.com>
Cc: <sdale@stevendale.com>; <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>; <SLovejoy@csu.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 28, 2004 5:06 PM
Subject: 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 17:17:23 UTC