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

2013-11-13 20:15, Léonie Watson wrote:
> For example: If I am on a page just above the start of the content area, and my screen reader announces "Navigation region, list of 3 items", and I am looking for the breadcrumb, there is enough evidence to suggest I'm in the right place to make further investigation worthwhile.

What is the relevance of “list of 3 items” here? If you are looking for 
a breadcrumb and you hear about navigation, how does the count help? Do 
you mean that if it said “list of 42 items”, you would decide that it is 
not a breadcrumb? That would mean, in effect, that you would benefit 
from list markup for navigational sets that are not breadcrumbs, rather 
than such markup for breadcrumbs.

How would this differ from hearing just “Navigation region”? You would 
not know whether it is a breadcrumb or just links to three pages of the 
site. But you don’t know that from “list of 3 items” either.

This all sounds like a rather indirect way of telling the user that 
there is a breadcrumb. A dedicated element, or an ARIA role, or just a 
title attribute would seem to be a better approach, directly addressing 
the problem. Well, “You are here:” addresses the problem, too, perhaps 
not in a theoretically brilliant way, but without postulating any 
specific client behavior.

What I’m worried about is that this “list paradigm” introduces 
complexity and arbitrary-looking rules for authors. Literally anything 
can be regarded as a list. Empty content is a list of zero items. A 
character is a one-item list of characters. And so on. We don’t use <ol> 
markup for sentences of a paragraph, even though a paragraph is an 
ordered list (sequence) of sentences and even though it might be useful 
to hear a sentence count before starting to listen to a paragraph. So 
what is the logical reason why a breadcrumb should be an <ol>, or (on 
some odd grounds) a <ul>?

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

Received on Wednesday, 13 November 2013 18:35:19 UTC