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

Léonie, that is very interesting.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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. 

 

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.

 

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.

 

Matt

 

From: Léonie Watson [mailto:tink@tink.uk] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2016 3:18 AM
To: 'Richard Schwerdtfeger' <richschwer@gmail.com>; 'Gunderson, Jon R' <jongund@illinois.edu>
Cc: 'Matt King' <a11ythinker@gmail.com>; 'James Nurthen' <james.nurthen@oracle.com>; public-aria@w3.org
Subject: RE: APG Landmark Design Pattern Update and Questions related to Banner and Contenting landmarks

 

From: Richard Schwerdtfeger [mailto:richschwer@gmail.com] 
Sent: 09 February 2016 16:19

On Feb 8, 2016, at 11:35 AM, Gunderson, Jon R <jongund@illinois.edu <mailto:jongund@illinois.edu> > wrote:

 

I am not sure why using the analogy of a “Table of Contents” is getting so much resistance, since it is something that most people can understand and help people to understand what landmarks can do.   I think where the analogy brea

 

ks down is that it is not useful when people get into sub sections, so maybe there is a better way to describe the analogy as a “high level table of contents of the content regions on the page”.

 

I agree with Jon on this. It is a table of contents for the page. People understand that. If landmarks are implemented correctly (everything in a landmark) then you indeed can jump to all content sections of the page. 

 

I'm not so sure that's how people do think about landmarks. I did a straw poll of people from the British Computer Association of the Blind forum, Twitter and the A11ySlackers channel. I asked:

 

Do you think of landmarks (banner, main, navigation etc.) as a table of contents for the page (y/n)?

 

Of the 34 people who have responded, 26 said no, 7 said yes, and 1 was unsure. Not extensive research, but suggests we might want to think of a better way to describe landmarks.

 

 

Léonie.

 

-- 

@LeonieWatson tink.uk Carpe diem