Skip to Content Button
2019-03-25
One of the golden rules for testing your website’s accessibility is the “keyboard-only” audit. This is where you test navigating through your entire site without the use of a mouse, but instead rely solely on tabbing through your content.
Unfortunately, one item is normally overlooked during this audit - a “skip to content” context button. Including a “skip to content” navigation item in your project is extremely useful because:
- speeds up user interaction with the content you want them to see
- on subsequent pages the user shouldn’t need to tab through the entire navigation each time
The HTML
For the sake of this demo we will assume that we currently have the following navigation setup in our project:
<nav role="navigation">
<a href="/">Home</a>
<a href="/about">About</a>
<a href="/archive">Archive</a>
<a href="/atom.xml">RSS</a>
</nav>
Now for the easy part - adding our simple content skip link with it’s own custom skip-content
class:
<nav role="navigation">
<!-- Skip to content button -->
<a class="skip-content" href="#main">Skip to Content (Press Enter)</a>
<a href="/">Home</a>
<a href="/about">About</a>
<a href="/archive">Archive</a>
<a href="/atom.xml">RSS</a>
</nav>
The CSS
Our first task is to make sure this new link isn’t visible or interactive by default unless the user explicitly tabs through the navigation. We do so by positioning the link outside of the main content view. It is important to use this absolute
position style instead of setting the display property to none
, since the display property technique will fully remove the element from the DOM (bad accessibility practices).
a.skip-content {
background: grey;
color: white;
left: -9999px;
padding: 0.5rem;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
}
Almost there
Now we just re-position the element when the user focuses on the link with a keyboard tab:
a.skip-content:focus {
left: 1rem; /* Whatever desired position */
}
All Done
This is a very basic accessibility win you can implement in your current projects with next to zero effort. Enjoy!