RE: Using Heading to Replace Skip Links

Hi all

Wow, thanks for all your speedy responses.

Judging from your responses, I'm leaning towards always doing an additional screen reader test for that point if there are no skip links.  I normally always check every page with at least NVDA anyway.  If there are no skip links, I'll see if I can use the heading structure to get to the main content.  If so, I think I should assume that it passes 2.4.1.

Does that sound reasonable?


Regards

Vivienne L. Conway, B.IT(Hons), MACS CT
PhD Candidate & Sessional Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Perth, W.A.
Director, Web Key IT Pty Ltd.
v.conway@ecu.edu.au
v.conway@webkeyit.com
Mob: 0415 383 673

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________________________________________
From: Patrick H. Lauke [redux@splintered.co.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, 9 May 2012 5:18 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Using Heading to Replace Skip Links

In which case, if that's how you see it, you can interpret WCAG 2.0's SC
as only being fulfilled if a page has skip links. That's the beauty of
WCAG 2.0 ... it's so open to interpretation :)

However, this does open up more interesting discussions: if the
functionality is available, but only if users have a particular
browser/extension/AT, is it a pass or a fail? The argument seems to be
that it should work everywhere, regardless of what software the user
has. Taking it to extremes, does that mean a site should be usable by a
visually impaired/blind user when they're not using a screen reader?
Should we then require sites to be self-voicing? A strawman, admittedly,
but this goes to the heart of "accessibility supported".

P


On 09/05/2012 10:09, Rajiv Shah wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In plain English, I think that, without browser extensions, user agents provide no method keyboard method to skp past headings on a page. Skip links at least aid the keyboard user without the use of any add-ons to provide this feature. This, of course, helps someone with a mobility impairment.
>
> Regards,
>
> Rajiv
>
>
> ---- Original message ----
>> Date: Wed, 09 May 2012 09:57:08 +0100
>> From: "Patrick H. Lauke"<redux@splintered.co.uk>
>> Subject: Re: Using Heading to Replace Skip Links
>> To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
>>
>> On 09/05/2012 09:24, Vivienne CONWAY wrote:
>>> The reason I ask all of this, is that some of the automated tools pick up the lack of  skip links as failures of 2.4.6. and others don't, especially if there are semantically structured headings (h1 etc).
>>
>> Automated tools were never reliable, even in WCAG 1.0 times, as
>> solutions are not binary accessible/not-accessible. This is even more
>> true for WCAG 2.0 which is driven by SCs that can be achieved in a
>> variety of known (what's documented in the informative techniques) and
>> unknown (something that's not documented, but achieves the same end
>> result for real users) ways.
>>
>>> Frankly, I think it should be a requirement as we're wanting to make things better for people to get to the content, not more difficult.  However, that probably comes down to usability.
>>
>> Then you'd end up having to add qualifiers like "Until user agents..."
>> to the requirements, and focus explicitly on specific markup constructs
>> (rather than being technology-agnostic), which are both things that WCAG
>> 2.0 tried very hard to shy away from.
>>
>> P
>> --
>> Patrick H. Lauke
>> ______________________________________________________________
>> re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
>> [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
>>
>> www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
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>> ______________________________________________________________
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>> ______________________________________________________________
>>


--
Patrick H. Lauke
______________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]

www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com | http://flickr.com/photos/redux/
______________________________________________________________
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2012 10:14:48 UTC