Scanning Navigation

A non-visual navigation strategy in which a screen-reader or voice-browser user steps rapidly through a page one fragment at a time — line by line, item by item, or in fixed jumps (e.g. page-down keys) — listening just long enough to each fragment to detect an 'information scent' that matches their goal. Research on blind web users has shown that scanning navigation typically dominates over logical navigation via heading tags or skip links, and that users commit to a fragment's relevance after only 1–5 words (roughly 300–700 ms). Understanding scanning behaviour is central to designing content that surfaces distinctive, scent-rich text at the boundaries of meaningful regions.