SkipTo to Bypass Blocks

The “Skip to Landmarks and Headings” extension and SkipTo page script were developed by members of the DRES Accessible IT Group that is part of the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

SkipTo Browser Extension

“Skip to Landmarks and Headings” extend the Chrome and Firefox browsers by identifying and providing navigation to the ARIA landmark regions and HTML section headings (h1–h6) of a web page. The extension provides a menu divided into two groups: (1) the important landmark regions and (2) an outline of the heading structure of the page.

The keyboard shortcut for opening the menu is alt+2 (or option+2 on macOS) and cursors keys can be used to navigate the menu. Activating a menu item scrolls the item into view and moves keyboard focus to the corresponding section of the page.

“Skip to Landmarks and Headings” provides a means for people using the keyboard to efficiently navigate to specific content on the page. The outline of headings provides an easy way for people to view the topics on a web page without having to scroll through the entire page.

The SkipTo extension can be installed in Firefox and/or Brave/Chrome by visiting their respective extensions websites:

SkipTo 5 Script

SkipTo script version 5 gives web authors a new way to implement the WCAG Bypass Blocks accessibility requirement as an alternative to the traditional “Skip To Main” found on many pages.  Little has changed regarding the “Skip To Main” technique typically used to satisfy the requirement over the past 20 years, while much has changed in the technologies of the web.  The SkipTo script is a major advancement in implementing the “bypass blocks” requirement using existing document structural elements, making it more reliable the current techniques.

NOTE: Version 5 is a complete rewrite of the SkipTo code to support custom web components and standardize shortcut key between browsers alt+0 on Windows/Linux (or option+0 on macOS).