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Re: Question on "skip to main content"

for

From: Karl Groves
Date: Sep 25, 2009 12:20PM

As Jared noted, 508 hasn't really been "updated" yet. At the moment the
present state (AIUI) is that the TEITAC committee has submitted its
recommendations and the Access Board is working to reconcile that report
plus public comments and other feedback into a final version which must
then also submit their version for approval.

As a more direct answer to the question (and an addition to what Jared and
Andrew have said), the notes I have from reading the TEITAC report when it
was finished is that 1194.22(o) is "gone".

The conventional wisdom at the moment is that there will be significant
"harmonization" between the refreshed version and WCAG 2.0. WCAG 2.0
currently has guideline 3.2.3: Consistent Navigation: Navigational
mechanisms that are repeated on multiple Web pages within a set of Web
pages occur in the same relative order each time they are repeated,
unless a change is initiated by the user. (Level AA)
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#consistent-behavior-consist
ent-locations

One of the "Success Criteria" for that guideline is the use of a method to
skip *to* navigation:
http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/consistent-behavior-consistent-l
ocations.html


As Andrew mentioned, others consider a document with proper structure,
content chunking and clear headings to be sufficient for this specific
issue and I tend to personally agree with him. On the other hand, given
that websites usually are not structured properly to support this, a "Skip
link" is a good alternative.



Karl Groves
Director of Strategic Planning and Product Development
SSB BART Group
<EMAIL REMOVED>
703.637.8961 (o)
443.889.8763 (c)
http://www.ssbbartgroup.com

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