WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Skip links and SEO

for

From: Moore, Michael
Date: May 3, 2007 8:10AM

No you are not missing anything, there is a feature of IE does not allow
in page links to function as expected unless the anchors are located
within a table cell. There are several hacks available to resolve this
issue. There is a great discussion of this issue on Jim Thatchers site
http://www.jimthatcher.com/skipnav.htm scroll down to about the middle
of the page.

Mike Moore
Accessibility Specialist
Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services (DARS)
(512) 424-4159

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2007 10:28 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Skip links and SEO

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