Using Voiceover to jump to internal links - html

Question

I am looking for a way to go from my navigational links using voice-over accessibility to jump to the internal part of the page that link I connected to.
For example:
I have a list of links on my left-hand side. One is for Forms. When I click on "Forms" my list of forms will populate to the right of that panel, and then if you click on a specific form, that Form will appear to the right of that panel. The page contains 3 panels with Navigation on the left, list in the middle, Form on the right.
Right now if I click on the Form link, I have to tab through my entire nav panel to get to the newly opened Forms list.
Are there some ARIA elements I am missing that will help tab directly into my Forms List from the Forms link?

Answer 1

There are two simple ways to do this.
Note that neither of the following ways need any aria to work, the aria in the following examples is purely for best practices when adding sections and headings to a page.
Option 1 - anchors
The first is using anchors pointing to ids on the page.
in your side bar
forms
main page section
<section aria-labelledby="forms">
<h2 id="forms">Forms</h2>
<!---your forms --->
</section>
Notice how I gave the page content a heading (pick an appropriate heading level) and then labelled the section with aria-labelledby. None of this is required to make this method work but it is a good practice.
The only thing you need to do is to make sure your href matches the ID of the heading.
However given that you are populating the forms on the right side of the page (I am assuming with an AJAX call) you may want to manually manage focus with JavaScript....
Option 2 - Use JavaScript and .focus()
If you are using JavaScript it is a similar principle, give the section heading an ID, but this time once the forms list has loaded set focus on the list heading.
html
<!--your link in the menu -->
forms
<!--section on the page, I omitted the aria here for clarity / simplicity but it is still needed-->
<section>
<h2 id="forms" tabindex="-1">Forms</h2>
</section>
JavaScript
// start: however you have this implemented at the moment
const formsLink = document.querySelector("#getForms");
formsLink.addEventListener('click', function(e){
e.preventDefault();
get('yourURL').then((data) => {
// populate the list
list.update(data);
// end: however you have this implemented at the moment
// once the list is populated set focus on the heading (last thing to do after everything else is done)
document.querySelector('#forms').focus();
});
});
Notice how in this example the <h2> has a tabindex="-1".
We need this to allow programmatic focus. We use -1 so we can focus the heading via JavaScript but it does not get added to the page focus order (so you can't access it with Tab).