The main navigation bar is on the left side of each page. If you are visually impaired and would like to bypass the navigation bar, use the skip navigation link at the beginning of the page.
The navigation bar provides several ways to access information:
If you are interested in a subject, you can choose it from an alphabetically sorted list under "Main Topics", or search for it using the "Search All Topics" feature.
Topic Index - Select a letter and browse through a list of "main topics" (approximately 400) to start your search. The main topics are privileged topics and have been identified as frequently used topics by a team of IRS tax law professionals.
Topic Search - Using as few words as possible, type in the word(s) that represent the subject you are looking for and press go or enter. This feature searches all the approximately 5000 topics in Tax Map, including the main topics, and provides users with a convenient way to find topics rather than scrolling through long lists. See "Search Help" on the left navigation bar for information on how to search.
The navigation bar also has links for search help, comments, and infomation about how Tax Map is created.
A topic page is the "home page" for a topic. The middle of the topic page has links to products that contain information about the topic. The right side of the topic page has links to related topic pages.
Each topic page contains a "contextual menu" that is located below the topic heading and any synonyms it may have. The "contextual menu" links to the groups of documents that are relevant to the topic. There may be groups of forms, publications, faqs, tax topics, and articles on web sites. The "contextual menu" will only list those groups that are available for the particular topic. Select the product group of interest and link down the page to that group.
Each text page has the following navigation features:
Previous Page | Table of Contents | Index | Next Page - Each publication is chunked into standard units for screen presentation. At the top of each page, links are available to allow users to page between previous and next units of information, and to access the table of contents and index for that publication.
Topic links - When available, topic links will appear next to publication headings on text pages. Selecting the topic will link the user to its topic page. If blue arrows appear on either side of the topic, it denotes that there are multiple occurrences of that topic within Tax Map. Selecting an arrow will take the user to the next or the previous occurrence of the topic.