[Irl-dean] EIQA's Global Website Certification - the W-Mark?

[Mark Magennis]

> From a purist point of view they are a bit of hack anyway, 
> navigation using headers makes far more sense.

I agree with you Henry. I never really liked them for that reason and I
would imagine that they do cause a little bit of confusion for sighted
users. Particularly when you press them and nothing seems to happen
because the page doesn't need to scroll. However, I think the benefits
they provide for keyboard users far outweighs this potential confusion.
I also agree that they should be used only when required, but I would
say that is the majority of websites have enough 'navigation' to skip
that they are required most of the time.

This brings us to the often forgotten and thorny issue of user
competency. We are constantly surprised at how little screen reader
users know about the (possible) structure of web pages and how to use
their screen reader to exploit it. There's a certain amount of chicken
and egg here. There's no point in learning how to navigate via headings
or extract the header information from a data table if you hardly ever
come across sites with correct heading structures and table markup to
exploit. Similarly, many screen reader users are as confused as anyone
when they come across a skip navigation link, because they've never seen
one before and they thought navigation was something a ship's pilot does
at sea. So, in answer to your question, although I've not witnessed a
sighted user being confused by a skip navigation link, I have seen a
blind user being confused by one!

Mark