Thread Subject: Re: Bypassing content.

From: Jared Smith
Date: Mon, Jun 18 2007 1:46 PM

• Return to this mailing list's archives
• View all messages in this thread
• Next message in thread: Hoffman, Allen: "Re: Bypassing content."
• Previous message in thread: Barrett, Don: "Re: Bypassing content."
• Messages sorted by: Author | Thread | Date

On 6/12/07, Peter Wallack wrote:

> So does my page satisfy the requirement simply by having the <H#> tags?

Yes.

> What about the keyboard-only user that isn't using any AT?

The user agent/browser SHOULD take care of this. The W3C's User Agent
Accessibility Guidelines require that they provide these mechanisms
for navigation. This doesn't, however, mean that they do. Some rather
obscure browsers support this natively and nearly all browsers can
with some very minor user scripting. See
http://juicystudio.com/article/heading-navigation-greasemonkey-user-script.php
for an example with Firefox.

What we want is a guideline that encourages the use of semantic
structure, headings, and lists, does not preclude the use of visible
skip navigation (our testing has found that "Skip to main content" is
a lot more understandable), but also does not *require* the visible
link to allow for current and future alternative mechanisms of doing
the same thing. We absolutely do not want a WCAG 1.0-esque "until user
agents" provision.

Many would argue that the presence of a visible skip navigation link
increases cognitive load and decreases accessibility for those not
navigating with keyboards. It is also one of the very few things that
directly impact visual design and that is a *VERY* big barrier for
implementation in many areas. I thus advocate a broader definition of
"mechanisms" to allow flexibility and future-proofing.

Jared Smith

• Next message in Thread: Hoffman, Allen: "Re: Bypassing content."
• Previous message in Thread: Barrett, Don: "Re: Bypassing content."