Tuesday 25 June 2002

Accessibility tip 06: Skip navigation

If you couldn’t hack your table-based template to present your main content first, Mark Pilgrim offers a compromise: allowing Lynx and JAWS users to skip over your navigation links entirely.

If your main content does comes first, this tip does not apply and Mark has given you a day off. I think I’ll use my day off to start work on the changeover from absolute to relative font sizes. Dorothea Salo has already made the switch and her site looks pretty spiffy so I might steal a leaf or two out of Dorothea’s style sheet.

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Comments

This tip isn't on Mark's site yet. Collusion!!!

Posted by tyler durden on 24 June 2002 (Comment Permalink)

Setting body to 100% let me do *most* things in ems. I wimped out on little-tiny text, though, and used xx-small. Mozilla had some trouble with the appropriate-size decimal em.

On the whole, though, it went pretty smoothly.

Posted by Dorothea Salo on 24 June 2002 (Comment Permalink)

I find myself wondering if Mark Pilgrim really is a wizard, capable of feats beyond the human ken. Consider:


I don't use tables in my site layout.
My main content comes first.
Jonathon tells me that users like me should take the day off.
Diveintomark.org still shows Friday's entry. The links in this article go to missing pages.


How did Mark know I didn't need to see his tip? He's customizing his display just for me, now. I mean, I knew CSS was powerful, but I had no idea.

I will take this as license to take the rest of the day off.

 

(I'm sure this will seem less funny to me when Mark reposts the articles Jonathan links to here. But for now...)

Posted by brett peters on 25 June 2002 (Comment Permalink)

One thing Mark forgot to mention is that today's tip works both ways - if you have content before navigation it is a good idea to provide a hidden link to skip over the content straight to the navigation. Mark does this on his own site.

Posted by Simon Willison on 25 June 2002 (Comment Permalink)

Simon is right, and I originally started writing it that way, but it was getting too confusing, so I switched it. Skipping *over* navigation is a section 508 requirement, and is (IMO) much more important than being able to skip *to* navigation. I'd love to cover everything, but I've only given myself 30 days. ;-)

Posted by Mark Pilgrim on 25 June 2002 (Comment Permalink)

Guys, when I checked Mark's post was up. Perhaps you haven't realized that I'm in Sydney, Australia while Mark is in North Carolina. You've probably been confused by the time difference. Or something. Heheh.

Posted by Jonathon Delacour on 25 June 2002 (Comment Permalink)

This discussion is now closed. My thanks to everyone who contributed.

© Copyright 2007 Jonathon Delacour