Lightly Toasted

For those that have noticed my weblog here doesn’t have a link ’skip to content’ instead it says ‘skip to main content‘. A fairly simplistic change one may say. But there is more to this than meets they eye! Blind users use Assistive technology to read pages on the internet. Tools like JAWS would read ‘Skip to Content’ with an accent on the second syllable. That would defeat the reason on having a skip link in the first place. The alternative to this is ‘Skip to Main Content’

Using ‘Skip to Main Content’ at the top of your pages ensures JAWS doesn’t get confussed about the world ‘content’ nor will it read it with the accent.

You may argue about using ‘Skip Navigation’ as an alternative but that fails miserably too. Navigation is an existing jargon in the web world and ‘Skip Navigation’ quite literally doesnt mean that they are going to lang in the content area next. Nor does it say if they are going to skip navigation at the top, left or any other part of the given page!

Thanks Steven Faulkner for pointing out a great resource. This is a 24 pages long PDF file, approximately 900kB, so it may take a while to download if you are on a slow connection. But I strongly suggest you read this. It is basically a set of guidelines written by Mary Frances Theofanos and Janice Redish from Maryland USA. Its called Guidelines for Accessible and Usable Web Sites having closely observed users who work with Screen Readers.

About The Project

This project was conducted between November 2002 and February 2003, ovserving and listening very patiently to 16 blind users as they worked with Web Sites and assistive technologies like Screen Readers.