Skip Navigation - I think we have that backwards

I was recently listening to a blind person explain how he goes about reading a news article online. He said that he looks for a link to print the article so his screen reader won't have to deal with navigation, sub-navigation, ads and other things that get in the way of getting to the desired content - the news story.

This got me to thinking about the general approach to Skip Navigation. The one I am most familiar with is, basically, to add functionality to the top of the page, or any navigation that resides in the page, to skip over it and into the main content. Now, let's say we have a big site. It has a top level navigation and sub-navigation based on what section you are in. Would I skip from the main navigation to the sub-navigation, then skip to the content? For the disabled user this sounds like a lot of work and can be potentially confusing.

So, I started to think about this in terms of what is the real desired outcome of skipping navigation. When I click on a link, I'm want to read the content that is behind that link. I don't want to read the navigation again, or read the next level of navigation, or the ads on the page. I use secondary navigation as a next step, or last resort, if I didn't find what I was looking for.

So, what if, instead of building pages that have lots of skip navigation code, we build pages that automatically put cursor focus on the content, and there's a way to 'skip' to the navigation? Like the finding a stripped down version of the content, the print version for instance, this method just puts out a simple rule: Drop the cursor where the content starts. The user doesn't even have to know about the extra stuff on the page, until they go looking for it. Now they don't have to spend time skipping over stuff, and not knowing where they might land.

Adding accessibility to an application or web site shouldn't be like putting toothpaste back in the tube.

Good experiences don't just happen; they are planned for and executed on. Why is the accessible experience any different? An afterthought? An additional margin/metric/number that pads project time and cost?

When deciding on a target audience for any web site or application, there's always that under lap and over lap of users. "We want to target Intermediate-Advanced users, but there will be some Intermediate users and some Expert users and we want everybody to get exactly what they want…" Those fringe use cases can drastically change the experience for that those target users and everybody's OK with it. I'm OK with it. Yet, when accessibility comes up, it’s somehow more than fringe. It' like long-tail or outer limits.

The exercise of creating an accessible experience forces us to break down the message into very simple terms and figure out how to deliver those terms in a new way. If we take this into consideration early in the design process does it not enhance the visual design?

Can an application have a narrative? It must.

As accessibility becomes a bigger interest of mine, it is becoming clearer to me that the issues are not in the functionality or code needed to create accessible apps. It'’s in the design of these apps. As a visual designer I must stop designing visually. I must learn to design 'narratively'.

How can I read you an interface? How do my app designs tell stories? Can I tell a great story with my design without any visual aid?

The shift lives in how we think about interface design and application concept.

Normally we think of our customers in a persona or scenario or a use case. We personify these made up customers with great ease because we have the voice of the user, by means of; feedback, interview, focus group, the list goes on. Then what is the voice of the app? Who is the app?

This is the mission. Personify the application. Breathe life into an experience in the same way that we breathe life into the users of the application. We do this by building a strong story, with beginning, middle and end. In the telling of that story, we have what I think is missing from 'accessibility design'.

We build our apps to be as visually pleasing and functionally solid as possible. We often focus so hard on this that the accessibility portion becomes afterthought. Something that must be retro fitted or hacked or rushed. I believe that by flipping the order of that we will not only have built a solid, usable, accessible app, but a visually stimulating and emotionally engaging experience.