Using Skip Navigation Links

If your web page has more than a few navigation links, it is useful to provide a skip navigation link to allow people using screen reading technology to skip over the navigation links to the main text of your web site. This can be done by placing a small, transparent image at the beginning of your document with a hyperlink to a bookmark at the start of the text. No one knows it's there except for the screen reader users. Text based hyperlinks may also be used, along with a cascading style sheet to prevent the display of the Skip Navigation link.

Skip navigation links do not always work inside tables; however, they can be used to jump past an entire table.

If your navigation links and main text are both in the same table, there are a few layout tricks which may be used to make screen reading technology read the main text before the navigation links.

Examples

In these examples, the web pages consist of several layout tables. The top tables include the banner and some navigation links. The main table includes navigation links on the left and the main content on the right.

Each of these pages has been displayed with screen reading technology, and the speech recorded. Links to the MP3 files are included in each page so you can hear what a blind individual using screen reading technology would hear. Most pages have two links. "Listen to the full page" is the way the page would sound if the user did not activate the skip navigation link. "Listen to the content" is what the page sounds like when the skip navigation link is used.

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Page maintained by dspsweb@cuesta.edu. Last modified: 11/06/2003.