Re: More materials for preparation for todays discussion of grouping links in the telecon

I found the reference I have been wanting us not to lose.

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ua/1999JanMar/0326.html

This is the point where we were talking about structural navigation on the
UA list and Jim Thatcher had to raise the skip-navigation hyperlink
technique, because he rates this as the single author technique with the
greatest bang for the buck, bar none.  I guess I have to qualify that as
bang equals benefit to the users of speech and braille screen readers.  But
still, one has to reflect on why he says that.

The Issues List points at the start of Paul Adelson's straw poll on the
WAI-IG list on this problem; the results are summarized at:


http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/1998JulSep/0057.html

This mostly reminds us that we need to do _something_ because there is a
real problem.

The skip-navigation hyperlink can serve as the advance guard of our
promotional campaign, because it offers such a short path into genuine
"thank-you" territory.  It is easy for sites to do, it works right away
with current browsers, and it makes a whale of a difference.  Never
underestimate the power of "thank you."  This one technique by itself might
just generate thank-you email to webmasters.

If this technique has that potential, it is not clear we want to blunt our
impact by digressing into harder techniques that do a yet better job after
and only if user agents (browsers and/or layered helpers) implement the
matching techniques.

User agent techniques that depend on sympathetic authors are not going to
fix the pages from the ignorant and un-converted.  Did I hear there is a
screen reader already out there that has implemented some sort of
skip-navigation heuristic algorithm?

There is an IE power toy that does an automatic table-of-contents sidebar,
isn't there?  How much of the sidebar does it devote to the head of page
navigation links?  Does it minimize that?  How?

Al

At 11:05 AM 8/26/99 -0700, Jon Gunderson wrote:
>Section 4.6.1 in the current Web Contents talks about grouping links:
>http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT-TECHS/#links
>
>Information on the GL issue list can be found at:
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JulSep/0044.html
>
>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 Thursday, 26 August 1999 14:00:33 UTC