Standards often emerge from patterns developers are already using, and the goal is to make those patterns easier and less error-prone. Kitty Giraudel takes this line of thinking to skip links, the accessibility feature that every site should have but that commonly goes wrong in a handful of ways.

  • The link should be the very first thing to tab into.
  • It should be hidden carefully so it stays focusable.
  • Upon focus, it must become visible.
  • Its text should begin with “Skip” to be easily recognizable.
  • It should point directly to the page’s main content.

A native implementation could potentially handle all these requirements and more—including automatically showing the link in the correct language for each user. It sounds like a promising project for someone to prototype, perhaps as a browser extension.

The proposal echoes earlier ideas about extending the Web Share API into native HTML—a notion that just makes sense.