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Imagining native skip links

• A proposal by Kitty Giraudel that is so brilliant, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been thought of and implemented already: native skip links.
• Every website ought to have a “Skip link” link as the first thing a keyboard user tabs to in the page. This is important for keyboard users and screen reader users, so that they can jump directly to the main content of the page (usually the <main> element or the first <h1>), skipping over all of the menus and header content that is duplicated on every page.
• Building these “skip links” isn’t difficult, but many sites fail to implement them, or do so incorrectly. So why not make it the responsibility of the browser?
• Kitty is clear that a native skip link should have as little customisability as possible, from the website’s perspective. All we should be able to set is the destination of the link, via a <meta> or <link> tag such as <meta name="skip-link" value="#content" />, where value is a CSS selector referencing a node in the DOM.
• Kitty even proposes a polyfill that sites might run to decide whether or not to include their bespoke skip link (in the event that the browser doesn’t have one natively). Not that this matters hugely in practice, as Kitty points out that a native skip link would not interfere with a bespoke one in any way, since the focus would have shifted over the bespoke skip link by the time it would have been reached.
• If you like the idea, be sure to +1 it on the WebWeWant GitHub discussion!

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