InfoForce Services (Angus MacKinnon) wrote:
This brings up a question. How effective are Skip navigation links? I
have heard that half the people do not understand what skip
navigation links are. I design web sites to get to the main content
or with very few links until the main content.
I'm in line with your approach. Main content should ideally come first
on a web page, although that's not always easy to perfect.
When asking my sight-impaired / blind friends in Norway about such
things, they tend to say: "Don't fix everything for us. We know how to
get around, and prefer our own solutions. 'Content first' helps, but
that's about it. Cut out the noise and remove all barriers."
My own very unscientific research says that 4 out of 10 do not
understand "internal links" in a web page, so they just tab past them.
"Skip Nav" comes in that category, and no international standards and
sketchy implementation doesn't help much here.
Some standards incorporated as link-relations handled by the browsers
are needed, or else all well-intended use of skip links in web pages
becomes just some more "smart but not very useful" noise.
Myself: My eyes are not young anymore, so I blow up all the tiny text
around - often using Opera's Zoom. "Skip Links" are rarely needed, and
they tend to become part of the noise.
Some of the latest "pop up when hovered *Skip Nav* links" are disturbing
to the point that I tend to skip those sites altogether.
An alternative that works well is to enter such "helpful" sites in
Opera's SSR-mode, and blow them up 400%. That works really well since so
few sites are styled for handheld yet. Besides, I can just dump their
CSS anyway and apply my own.
No "Skip Anything" that can be avoided, is my approach. Look one more
time at the design-method instead.
regards
Georg
--
http://www.gunlaug.no
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