SkipTo Landmarks & Headings
Installation
The SkipTo extension can be installed in Firefox and/or Brave/Chrome by visiting their respective extensions websites:
Source Code
SkipTo Landmarks & Headings is open source software. The code is available at https://github.com/skipto/extension.
Overview
SkipTo Landmarks & Headings extends the web browser by providing a menu for easy navigation to the ARIA landmark regions and HTML section headings of a web page.
The keyboard shortcut for opening the menu is alt+2 (option+2 on Mac keyboards) and cursors keys can be used to navigate the menu (see Keyboard Shortcuts below). Activating a menu item scrolls the corresponding landmark region or heading element into view and moves keyboard focus to it on the page.
The menu is divided into two sections: Landmarks, the important landmark regions; and Headings, an outline of the heading structure found on the page.
ARIA landmarks provide names for regions that are common to many web pages, with familiar functions most of us have encountered, such as navigation menus, main content, search boxes, etc.
The Landmarks section of the SkipTo menu may include, in the following order, these ARIA landmarks:
| Landmark | Description |
|---|---|
| main | the main content of a document |
| search | a collection of items and objects that combine to create a search facility |
| navigation | a collection of navigational elements (usually links) for navigating the document or related documents |
| complementary | content that is designed to be complementary to the main content, but remains meaningful when separated from it |
| contentinfo | information about the parent document |
Headings are used by content authors to provide hierarchical labels for the sections and subsections of a web page, with heading levels ranging from 1 (usually the document title) through 6.
The Headings section of the SkipTo menu is formatted as an outline and can be configured to limit the headings displayed to a maximum heading level, as described below in Options/Preferences.
SkipTo Landmarks & Headings provides a means for people using the keyboard to efficiently navigate to specific content on the page. Additionally, 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.
Keyboard Shortcuts
To open the SkipTo Landmarks & Headings menu using the keyboard, press alt+2 (option+2 on Mac keyboards).
You can navigate through the menu items by pressing the following keys:
| Shortcut Key | Description |
|---|---|
| arrow up / down | step through the items one at a time |
| page up / down | move eight items backward or forward |
| home / end | move to the first or last item |
| m | next main landmark |
| n | next navigation landmark |
| s | next search landmark |
| a | next complementary landmark |
| c | next contentinfo landmark |
| 1–6 | next heading of that level |
Options/Preferences
Landmarks
By default, SkipTo Landmarks & Headings displays main, search, navigation and contentinfo landmarks when found on the page. In addition to these, the Options/Preferences form allows you to toggle on or off the inclusion of complementary landmarks.
Headings
The Preferences form provides a means for selecting the maximum depth of heading levels used to create the headings outline. The benefit of limiting the maximum depth is to make the outline shorter and easier to scan for topics of interest.
Also in Preferences is an option for choosing whether heading level numbers are displayed. When this option is toggled on, the heading level number is added as a prefix to each heading menu item.
Additionally, there is an option to only include headings contained within the main landmark region. In well-structured pages, the main region contains the most important information on the page. Enabling this setting makes it easier to identify topics of interest by filtering out headings in other parts of the page.