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@Zegnat
Created February 24, 2012 12:03
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Fixing your skip links. [JS]

Fixing your skip links.

Read Damon Muma on this. He proposes the following jQuery solution (inspired by Thompson, fixed by me):

// Apply focus properly when accessing internal links with keyboard in WebKit browsers.
$("a[href^='#']").not("a[href='#']").click(function() {
   $("#"+$(this).attr("href").slice(1)+"").focus();
});

I don’t like to use jQuery however, and have been trying to port it to plain Javascript.

Version history.

  1. Pilot version. (d385d2)
  2. tabindex now using -1 instead of 0, as per Smith, added this README, and added UNLICENCE. (c194df)
  3. Updates to the README. (0fce31)
  4. Added file extension to README. Oops. (a31368)
  5. Last change to README. I hope. (7d175b)
  6. Added a clause to check for pre-existing tabindex values. (a39c9b)
  7. Added support for named anchors. The name attribute is obsolete and is only checked for backwards compatibility. (0ab22c)
  8. Current: No more errors on empty fragments (#) or undefined elements (#thisIDisnotused).
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@komputist
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Hi! Would it be possible to extend this method so that links followed from the longdesc attribute or the cite attribute would also change focus? For a Webkit browser that allows you to open @longdesc URLs and @cite URLs, see iCab. http://www.icab.de Longdesc attribute URLs and cite attribute URL are, in iCab, opened via a contextual menu. I have a test page here: http://malform.no/testing/a-demo-of/longdesc-with-hidden-iframe/

@pmgodin-zz
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I preferred the native javascript version since the jQuery one may interfere with deeplinking "/#/deeplink" syntax because "/" cannot be used as jQuery selector.

@Zegnat
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Zegnat commented Oct 10, 2012

@komputist sorry for missing your comment. I’ll try to look into it but I can’t promise anything. It’s easy to bind to an onClick event and I don’t expect iCab to trigger a JavaScript event because you want to display the longdesc.

Maybe I can couple this to the onhashchange event, but no promises.

@Zegnat
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Zegnat commented Oct 10, 2012

@komputist sorry for missing your comment. I’ll try to look into it but I can’t promise anything. It’s easy to bind to an onClick event and I don’t expect iCab to trigger a JavaScript event because you want to display the longdesc.

Maybe I can couple this to the onhashchange event, but no promises.

@virtualgeoff
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The jQuery solution above doesn't work if the targets are not actual links i.e. if they are not able to accept focus. So I tried your pure JS solution but it interferred with some in-page scrolling I have that also uses fragment identifiers.

In the end I combined both approaches:

$('.skiplinks a').click(function() {
    $("#" + $(this).attr("href").slice(1)).attr("tabindex",-1).focus().removeAttr("tabindex");
});

@simeydotme
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Thank you so much for this, works perfectly for me!
I think this should be included in the HTML5 Boilerplate , it's as important as .visuallyhidden and chromeframe, can't believe I didn't realise this was broken sooner.

@Veyfeyken
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This breaks the back-button of the browser. More info and fix on WebAIM's e-mail list:
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=6363

Also, please vote for a webkit fix:

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=116046
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=262171

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