Did you remember our post on Skip links – what, why and how?. In that article, we have seen how skip links would benefit users who uses screen readers or keyboard only but wouldn’t it be cool if Skip links actually helps everyone?
Thanks to PayPal (External link) for introducing an enhancement to skip to by introducing SkipTo Plugin (External link).
Let’s say you run a knowledge base portal or a news daily and your readers would love to browser by skim reading the page and read complete article of their choice. So they decide to skim read by headings and as you know one needs to either a scroll through the page with mouse or use down arrow on the keyboard. Wouldn’t it be cool, if your readers have a choice where they don’t require to scroll down and down a lot to skim read and able to browse all headings at one place? That’s exactly what SkipTo plugin offers. Not only your readers can browse through headings easily but the tool also have ability to show them important sections of the page such as content area, navigation, search etc., What’s more? if your reader is in middle of e page and would want to see the headings list, they can do so just by using a keyboard short cut key! You, as a developer or author, have a flexibility to decide what level of headings you would want to display, whether to show module on keyboard focus or page load and decide a keyboard short cut key.
You can very much experience the SkipTo plugin on this website. Thank you PayPal Accessibility team for this wonderful gift! BTW, this plugin is open sourced so any of you can help improve the plugin!
Once again here is the link to grap SkipTo plugin…
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