RE: APG Landmark Design Pattern Update and Questions related to Banner and Contenting landmarks

From: Matt King [mailto:a11ythinker@gmail.com] 
Sent: 10 February 2016 19:15
"I am not sure what it means though. It might simply mean that a lot of people do not read the spec because the table of contents idea is sprinkled throughout the spec and in a lot of articles on the topic."

 

I'm sure lots of people don't read the specs! I deliberately didn't mention specs though. I was just curious whether people at large associated landmarks with the concept of a ToC.

 

"What I would like to better understand is how authors think about the table of contents notion when they are told to use that as the base concept for designing landmarks."

 

Yes, that would be good. Of the people who responded who I know to be developers (and in some cases screen reader users as well), they all responded no. That was a smaller subset of the 34 of course.

 

"In my experience, the table of contents concept often leads authors astray. There are two issues:

1.       It leads them to create too many landmarks.

2.       They omit sections that would be really useful as a landmark because they do not fit into the information architecture idea that accompanies a table of contents."

 

Agreed. I think a third is that a ToC is generally linear. 1 followed by 1.1, then 2, then 2.1, 2.2 and so on. Landmarks are not linear.

"So, is it easier to overcome these 2 problems by supplementing the “table of contents” concept or by simply leaving the “table of contents” term out of the landmark notion? I don’t know. I have a tendancy to think that people have such strong ideas about the table of contents concept that it may be easier to get really good results by leaving that term off the table."

 

I would drop it.

 

"Maybe the best thing to do is come up with some alternative wording and then pole this group to see if it does a better job of hitting the mark."

 

I'm still not sure we need an analogy at all? The definition of a landmark (in the traditional sense), is a recogniseable feature that can be navigated to. That seems to pretty well sum up ARIA landmarks too, presumably why we chose the term to begin with.

 

 

Léonie.

 

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@LeonieWatson tink.uk Carpe diem