Lions District 4-C4 - Web Access Resources for Web Masters - Accessibility - Skipping Menus for Web Readers.


Lionism District Members Activities Calendar Newsletter Resources Links Site Map Contacts Home	Skipping Standard Menus in Web Readers What & Why Web readers have a special function that allows users to tab through all of the links on a web page. If you are blind, this is extremely handy, especially on pages that you revisit regularly. It means that you don't have to listen to your web reader read through the page until you get to the link that you need to use. However, most web sites have one or two standard menus often containing 20 or more links that occur on every one of their web pages. If you are looking for a link in the text of a page, or just want to read the content of the page, you don't want to have to listen to your web reader recite all the standard links before you get to the page content. To obviate this problem, place a special "Skip Menu" link just before the standard menu. When activated, this "Skip Menu" link jumps to the page content which follows the standard menu. The "Skip Menu" link is usually made to be invisible so that it does not detract from the look or content of the page for sighted users. This very web page has such an invisible lilnk inserted just before the "Lionism" menu link. It takes web readers to the top of the text in the white pannel. Here's how it works. Inserting the Invisible Link First, prepare a gif graphic that is 1 pixel by 1 pixel. This graphic, entitled "SkipMenu.gif," is the same color as the background over which it is placed. In this case, it is the same pale yellow as the background of the column that contains the page menu. Second, insert the following line just before your menu. ‹ a href=#skip_menu› ‹img src=SkipMenu.gif alt="Skip Menu" border=0› ‹/a › META Lines for Language Browsers and Web Readers can interpret language related commands using a variety of different information lines. For this reason, it is wise to provide additional language direction in the form of META commands which are placed in the document HEAD following the TITLE. For US English, we recommend the following META lines: ‹meta http-equiv="Content-language" content="en-US"› ‹meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"› Use META NAME Lines to Direct Searchers to Your Web Pages META NAME lines are used by search engines and information gathering spiders to index web sites so that they can be located when folks go looking for them on the web. They are also a good way to establish your copyright and authorship. We recommend you include, at a minimum, the following. ‹META NAME="company" content="your club or district name here"› ‹META NAME="keywords" content="Lions, Service Club, and other keywords here separated by comas"› ‹META NAME="revisit-after" content="number of days, e.g., 30 days"› ‹META NAME="copyright" content="for example - © 2002 Lions District 4-C4"› ‹META NAME="Author" Content="your name here"› FOR MORE ABOUT META LINES VISIT THIS WEB SITE.