The blind leading the blind…?

I’m in the habit of adding several minor accessibility features as a matter of course. “Skip links” are one such technique. In principle, hidden links at the top of the page allow screen reader users to move directly to defined content areas. This bypasses elements (such as navigation menus) that they wouldn’t wish to hear every time they load a page.

Dive Into Accessibility recommends the CSS that I’ve used so far to hide them:

#skiplink {display:none;}

Yet Bite Size Standards specifically discourages this technique…

Why not use (display: none;) in the style sheet? It seems like it would make sense, but it doesn’t work. Screen readers will respect the display property of “none” and the link will not be there.
#skiplink {position: absolute; margin-left: -9999px;}
This declaration positions the skip nav off the viewport -9999 pixels, rendering it, in effect, invisible. The skip nav is still there, though, for screen readers, text-browsers (Lynx), and those with style sheets disabled.

Finding something like this questions the expertise of not only the originating article, but the whole website and its author. Clearly, Dive Into Accessibility haven’t tested this method before recommending it, or its inadequacy would have been revealed.

It’s instances like this that makes Brent’s view that accessibility discussion is a passing fad, whose recommendations are meritless seem entirely justified. Obviously the first technique does not serve those that it’s intended to help and so cannot possibly be a product of user request. Unfortunately, as a web developer who does not use a screen reader I have to take on faith that these techniques are from a credible source and actually work. Without conducting my own research I see no more reason to trust the second technique.

Philosophically speaking, I’m committed to making my work as accessible as I can. When my website goes live, it will represent the best of my knowledge at that time. I’m resigned to the fact though that many of the techniques I take for granted may be utterly useless, so I will appeal to my users to feed back. In the end, that is the only solution.

These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.