Re: 4.13.1 Bread crumb navigation - use of right angle brackets

Léonie Watson wrote:
>
> Some thoughts on Steve’s breadcrumb examples:
>
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/377471/breadcrumb.html
>
> Example 1 (list with arrow) offers the most helpful information…
>
> The list causes my screen reader to inform me there is a group of 
> related items, and that there are four items in that group. This 
> information helps me decide how best to interact with the page at this 
> point (keep reading or skip over this chunk of content).
>
Can you please explain how the information helps you in making the 
decision? Just knowing that there is a group of four related items does 
not sound like a good basis for such a decision. Are you implying some 
extra information that says that this is specifically breadcrumb 
information?

I would normally expect people to listen to a few items in the list, if 
they only know that there is a group of some number of related items. 
For a breadcrumb like this, it is probably faster to listen to them all 
than to listen to a a description that says that there is a group of 
four related items, listen to a few of them, realize that this sounds 
like a breadcrumb, and decide whether you wish to listen to the rest, too.

It’s all very different if there is a list of fourty-two items. Then it 
is useful to know that they form a group, if you have some way of 
skipping the rest after listening to a few of them.

The words “You are here:” convey a message about a breadcrumb, at least 
after some experience with similar constructs on other pages. But I 
think none of the alternative markups adds anything useful to this.


> The introduction of the nav element would make even more useful 
> information available to me. In other words, the combination of the 
> nav and list markup conveys the same information to me (via my screen 
> reader) that a sighted person is able to take in at a casual glance.
>
Knowing that something is navigational can be relevant, of course. It 
can help us to skip navigation when it is not relevant and to find it is 
when it is relevant. Discussion about the impact of <nav> on 
accessibility has mostly related to the skipping issue (for which there 
are currently clumsy but working techniques available). A <nav> element 
can also help in finding navigation, if browsers provide a tool for 
that. But with current HTML, browsers can’t really help the user to find 
some specific navigation, such as a breadcrumb.

I think this would be the main reason for including an element (or an 
attribute) for breadcrumbs. A simple element, around a breadcrumb, no 
matter how it has been marked up otherwise, would make it easy to 
browsers to implement a command for getting an answer to the question 
“where am I?”, i.e. “what is hierarchic place of the current page in its 
site?”

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 13 November 2013 12:30:28 UTC