Citrus Skies

Skip to Flicker

26 June 2006

No, this isn’t related to everyone’s favourite photo sharing site, but rather a minor annoyance occurring on a slowly increasing number of websites.

It all starts innocently and with good intentions. Designers, with accessibility in mind, place links at the top of their site pages that allow you to “Skip to Content” or “Skip to Search”. All good so far. In fact, I’ve added just such a link to this very site.

The next step is the decision, which seems sound enough, to hide these links (using CSS), from the majority of site visitors, i.e. those not reliant on screen readers nor browsing the site on a PDA or mobile phone. These visitors don’t really need the links so why take up page space with them? Fair enough.

Now, we come to the crunch. For some reason, the designers of these sites have decided that its a good idea to display the links if the you happen to move your mouse over the area where the links are hiding. Often this involves a full window width bar or box suddenly appearing at the top of the screen and usually in a contrasting colour to its surroundings.

A little distracting at the best of times, the sudden flicker, on and off, of the link bar slowly becomes irritating if you’re using a browser that supports “tabbed browsing” and regularly move your mouse pointer across the top of the page to change the current tab.

OK, its hardly a major problem, but featuring on some high profile websites (including the Web Standards Project), its a trend that I can see growing. All I’m asking is that people consider whether or not its really a good thing, before hopping on the bandwagon.

In my view, the answer here is simple. If you want to show the “Skip to …” links, then show them. If you want the links hidden, then hide them. If, however, your intention really is to irritate visitors with flashing content, you might as well just dust off the old <blink> tag.

Article Tags: blink, css, design, flicker, accessibility