Skip navigation links are a good thing, even if your average user can’t see them. They can become a bad thing if your layout assumes that they’re not visible to sighted users of IE8. For some of my menus, (and I don’t know why one does and the others don’t) there’s this annoying space at the top. Using IE8’s marvelously upgraded debugger, I can see that it’s a skip link… with height and width of 0 pixels… that’s still showing up? How??

After much fruitless searching, I found a lonely little forum entry from last year that offers the following one-line fix:

SkipLineText=”"

Put that line in the menu tag declaration or the skin file and you’re golden… unless you can’t see. Then there’s unfortunately nothing for your screenreader to read. *sigh* Hopefully this little ‘feature’ gets an official patch soon.