Safari was tested with VoiceOver in Snow Leopard.īelow is a (rather wide) table summarizing the results. In the case of Internet Explorer and Firefox, these were also tested with JAWS 11, Window-Eyes 7.11, NVDA 2010.1. Each of these was tested using just the keyboard. The browsers tested were Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6, Safari 4.0.3, and Opera 10.53. The same effect is also caused using tabindex='-1'. Where a target anchor is found within a ' div with height,' this means it is wrapped in a div styled with height='100%' in order to set hasLayout in Internet Explorer, which is needed for IE to properly update the input focus position.

a element with name, id and tabindex='-1'Įach of the a elements in the test page contain text, but I did also perform all of the tests with empty a elements as well, and there was only one minor instance where the results were different: SAToGo in IE8 will not properly update focus where an in-page link targets an empty a element with an id attribute and tabindex='-1'.

a element with name and id in div with height.

a element with name in div with height.

The page used for the test implements the following types of in-page anchors: Wouldn't it be grand if we could simply add an id to an element and thereby use it as an anchor in all browsers and screen readers? It's also the case that how a browser behaves with internal page links is not necessarily the same when a screen reader is thrown into the mix.

It should be noted that Internet Explorer is not the only browser that had or has issues with different in-page link markup, as the results below demonstrate. Much of this should be familiar, but I figure it's always nice to have something to refer to. To have a semi-comprehensive overview of how in-page links are behaving in current browsers, with and without screen readers, I threw together a quick test. Often discussed in the context of 'skip links', this has been something of an issue for years, the various reasons for and effects of which have been documented well enough by the likes of Jim Thatcher, Gez Lemon, Mike Cherim, WebAIM, and others. That in-page links work and properly update the page's input focus can be crucial for users that rely on keyboard navigation, especially if they do not also use a screen reader.

Inpage link