Multiple Skip Links
I’ve just been reading a post on the Web Standards Group from Steve Green of Test Partners.
He mentioned that his testing group had come across a site that had no fewer that six ’skip to’ links such as ’skip to main navigation’, ’skip to sub navigation’, ’skip to main content’ etc. The end result was so verbose that he felt that the site really needed a ’skip past all these skip links’ link!
The point we all need to keep in mind is that screen reader users benefit from pages being as terse as possible (i.e. less to remember), and that sometimes they are hindered by features that have been added to help them.
I found this to be particularly interesting as I’d recently been experimenting with implementing multiple skip links on sites - especially those with multiple columns. It’s certainly made me re-think my approach. Bearing Steve’s comments in mind, I now think that it’s probably counter-productive to have more than three skip links (at the very most) at the top of a page and possibly better sticking with just the one.
Where there is a clear need for more than one skip link on a page, perhaps a visible skip link just before each section, or column, that requires it might be the best approach. In theory, this places less strain on the user to remember a whole list of links and means that they don’t have to deal with a whole bunch of links at the top of every page before they get to some meaningful content.