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Re: Skip links and SEO

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: May 2, 2007 9:30PM

On 5/2/07, Keith Parks wrote:

> In the couple of samples mentioned/linked on posts, if I'm tabbing
> through links, come upon the "Skip" link, and hit Enter, the screen
> jumps to that spot (Beginning of Main Content), but the Focus did
> not, so if I continue tabbing (to get to links *within* the
> "Content"), it goes back to where it was (the link following the
> "Skip" link). So one has to end up tabbing through all the links anyway.
>
> Or am I missing something?

A Google search or search in this list's archives for "haslayout" will
provide much on the topic, at least for Internet Explorer. It's a bug
that has lingered for many years in IE, despite plenty of begging and
pleading for it to be fixed.

The short of it is, that if the tab focus doesn't change, then your
browser is broken. Unfortunately, most of them are. I did an audit a
while back of the browsers that actually do this correctly, let alone
support keyboard navigation at all. There were very few that
functioned correctly. Firefox on a PC (and on a Mac if you modify an
about:config setting) and a few other less common browsers were the
only ones to really support navigation to anchors or ids. Screen
readers often fix this bad behavior, though that does little for
keyboard users that don't have a screen reader.

Jared Smith
WebAIM