Skip to content link

When screen reader users are browsing pages on a site, they start at the beginning of the page and have everything read out in order. This gets tedious upon multiple page views, especially when there are many links in the navigation to read through every time they land on a new page.

For this reason, a key accessibility feature of many sites is to offer a skip to content link (hidden by default for visual users), that is read out as the first item on the page, so they can skip over the navigation and get straight into the main page content if they want to.

For sighted keyboard users, this link becomes visible when it is tabbed to via keyboard, so it is clear what has focus at that point. But as soon as the user tabs to something else, it becomes invisible again so as not to disrupt the visual flow of the page.

This site employs such a link. To see it in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, try refreshing the page and then hitting the Tab key, which should give focus to the first focusable element on the page, which will be this link. To see it in Safari (which does not offer the same Tab key functionality), activate the VoiceOver screen reader in system settings, then navigate through the page; it should be one of the first elements read out to the user.