When a navigation bar appears at the top of a page and/or down the left side of the page, users who are reading the page with speech synthesis will have to listen to all of those links across the top and down the left for each page they visit at the site before they get to the main content. However, users who are sighted ignore the links and go right to the main content. The purpose of this checkpoint is to fix this inequity.

The most simple solution is to simply create a bookmark at the beginning of the page content and a link before the navigational menu (such as the "Skip Navigation Links" at the top of this page, linked to a bookmark "#SkipToContent" at the beginning of the information on the page. This allows the user to skip over all links and get to the important information.

Does this link from "Skip Navigation Links" to the bookmark #content have to be as obvious as on this site? Of course not, you could easily use the same color text as the background for the "Skip Navigation Links" link - or even incorporate it into a "hot spot" on an image - the purpose is to allow the user of screen readers to skip over the menus and get to the main content of the page.