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Re: Visible skip navigation links, was: good example

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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Dec 3, 2003 6:56AM

> The people who DON'T have any use for a skip link are the
> elderly who use a mouse ... a person, surfing visually, using a
> mouse, will not have any use for a skip link.

I kind of disagree with this. There are issues to do with what the skip
navigation link is used for and what Web users with low vision need in order
to efficiently and effectively browse a page. Users with low vision, many of
them elderly, often cannot view pages at normal magnification. They have to
either increase the text size using their browser controls or use screen
magnification software. I have watched people using anything between 2 times
and 16 times magnification. In these cases, there is considerably less
screen area in view at once and what the user is looking at is a small
window that they can move around the large page. Of course, this is what
everybody is doing really, but most of us have a screen-sized window which
is as wide as the page and often nearly as long. But try looking at your web
pages through a square cut-out one sixteenth the size of your screen and you
will get an impression of what it can be like for some people. In this case,
scrolling becomes a significant burden and finding information on the page
is often a case of wandering around until you come across it. This can be a
very disorienting experience and, due to this disorientation, users with low
vision often do not become particularly comfortable or proficient at it. If
you watch the screen exploration behaviour of many such users, you will be
struck by how much of the page they simply do not visit, how little
knowledge they build up of what they have and have not visited and how poor
their impression of the page contents and layout is. It can therefore help
greatly if there are links at the top of the page to jump to the different
sections or 'chunks' of the page, acting like a table of contents for the
page.

The reason I don't completely disagree with Stephanie is that she is talking
specifically about a link to skip past the navigation, helping the user
avoid a block that is repeated on every page. The navigation is, or at least
should be, consistently the same block of screen area on every page.
Therefore, after finding their way past it once or twice, users might be
expected to be able to learn how big it is and be able to scroll past it
without too much difficulty. In practice, however, many users fail to learn
this kind of thing, so I still think that a link would provide a more
efficient and effective navigation method.

This raises interesting questions about the role of the skip navigation link
as opposed to the more general idea of a within-page jump-to-content link. A
skip navigation link is like a table of contents for the page with a single
entry, except that the entry is presented as pointing past something rather
than pointing to something. I wonder whether this is a good idea. Pages
often have more than one 'chunk' on them and users (vision impaired or
otherwise) are primarily interested in going to particular chunks. A good
example is a page of news. There may be a headlines section, a sports
section, a politics section, a War in Iraq section, etc. Add to these the
navigation section, the advertising section, the free offers section, etc.
and you have a lot of potential points of interest. Most of the time, users
do not want to skip one of these sections, but to go to a specific section.
Think of yourself with a paper newspaper. Do you think "I'll go past the
main headlines, home news and international news sections" or do you think
"I'll go to the sports section" or "I'll go to the crossword". On a web
page, the exception perhaps is the omnipresent navigation block, which users
often want to skip - but only if they know that having skipped it they will
be where they want to be. If there is only one other chunk of interest on
the page - a content block - then this may work, but this may be a special
restricted case.

I am therefore of the opinion (still very open to argument) that it would be
better to have a number of same-page jump-to-content links at the start of
each page (a table of contents for the page), than a single skip-navigation
link. This would, I think, be a great help for screen reader users, mouse
users with low vision and sighted keyboard-only users. So it should
therefore be visible.

Mark


Dr. Mark Magennis - EU Projects

National Council for the Blind of Ireland
Whitworth Road, Dublin 9, Republic of Ireland

<EMAIL REMOVED> tel: +353 (0)71 914 7464



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