what load order? content or nav first?

[intrudah]

With CSS layouts and absolute positioning I realized that in some cases order of the div tags does not effect the layout, so the code can be arranged so that different parts load first.

What would be better to load the content or the navigation?

an example of this would be on the site im working on (with mock content) http://revolutionz.net/working/medico/ the content shows up after the header then the nav loads last..

[Ankou]

For accessibility reasons I've read that if you load you menu first you should provide a method to skip ahead to the contents of the page. Which I take to mean that if possible you should load the contents before the navigation.

If you're wondering why that's suggested for accessibility reasons it's because of screen readers. If you have a navigation section with a lot of information (or a little info but long titles) the screen reader has to work it's way through the whole navigation section before it gets to the content - which is why the people are at your site to begin with.

So when possible I always try to place my content before my navigation. If I can't do that - because of layout reasons or requests from a client - then I'll use a div that's placed at the very top with and use some CSS to hide/not show the div. Screen readers usually don't skip an element with display: none; so they'll have a link that will allow them to jump right to the content.