Re: navigation bars

to follow up on what Marja-Riitta Koivunen said:

> Sorry, I accidently sent this only to Charles:
> 
> What I really would like to have is a navigation bar that is
> always available to the user at a consistent place in each page
> and which highlighs the current selection. The highlighting
> tells the user immediately where he is at that site (what he
> selected earlier) and the navigation bar what the other higher
> level topics are. This is important for orienting every user.
> With blind users I think it is even more important: you can
> directly go and hear the higher level topics without a need to
> go through every link on a site.

This is a nice device, but it is largely a visual concept.
Highlighting the "you are here" point in an overview of the whole
contents is adaptive in sight and I fear much less so in sound.
In sound it is sufficiently important to economize on what you
try to convey that I would think that only the path down the tree
to the current point in the tree should be articulated as a "you
are here" and then the user may be prompted with some short list
of navigation targets if they don't take any action for some
timeout period.

The generic navigation framework is something like the "within,
nearby, world-wide" three-part list of navigation choices that
Dan Connolly has used occasionally.  Tracing the tree down to
here gives the "you are here" and there may need to be some
intelligence applied to provide a short enough list of navigation
options to be well tuned to the performance environment of
listening.

> One problem is that we need to have memory (variable) for the
> current selection.

The UA knows that.  Do we need to expose it for exploitation in
styles?

> The hierarchical navigation bars need a bit more thinking about
> all the details, but the idea is the same.

I keep having this idea that Jutta told us in Boston that Toronto
had done some prototyping and user testing with tre-walking
navigation interfaces.  Is this true?  Is it written up
somewhere?

Al

-- All quote below
> 
>   Marja
> 
>  At 05:25 AM 11/12/98 +1100, you wrote:
> >We discussed this last week and I guess it is going to come up tonight. 
> >As I recall we were talking about using DIV or SPAN with CLASS="nav" and 
> >TITLE="nav" as appropriate. Check the minutes for the telecon.
> >
> >If it is possible to navigate by any element (including DIV and SPAN) 
> >then this should be sufficient to allow the creation of navbars that can 
> >be styled at will.
> >
> >Charles McCathieNevile
> >
> >On Wed, 11 Nov 1998, Jon Gunderson wrote:
> >
> >> Is there any recommended combination of HTML and CSS elements in the Page
> >> Authoring Guidelines that should be used to create WWW site navigation bars?
> >> 
> >> Jon
> >> 
> >> 
> >> Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
> >> Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
> >> Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
> >> University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
> >> 1207 S. Oak Street
> >> Champaign, IL 61820
> >> 
> >> Voice: 217-244-5870
> >> Fax: 217-333-0248
> >> E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
> >> WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
> >> 	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess
> >> 
> >> 
> >
>

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 1998 21:28:51 UTC