3rd try: proposal for marking up groups of links

Here's the revised proposal, the first proposal is available at

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JulSep/0314.html
the 2nd proposal was at:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/1999JulSep/0328.html
the original text that we are proposing to change is at:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-TECHS-19990505/#links

 4.6.1 Grouping and bypassing links 
 
When a navigation bar - a set of links that appears on every page
throughout a site
highlighting other areas of the site - appears at the top of a page, a user
who is
reading the page through speech synthesis will have to listen to all of
those links

for each page they visit at the site before they get to new content.  
Other users, such as some users with physical 
disabilities, may have to tab through all of these links to reach links
further down the page.

There are several methods that you can use to allow users to quickly pass
groups
of links (navigation bars, table of contents, etc.) to get to other
portions of a page.  
In today's browsers, you will need to 
provide a link before the group of links that will take the user to the first
bit of text after the group of links.  In the future, using structural
markup like the MAP 
element will allow a user agent to navigate past the group on user command. 
To support both today's
and tomorrow's browsers, we suggest using the MAP element with 
the "title" attribute to group and label the links, plus a "skip" link
before the group.  
The "skip" link may be hidden using style sheets or be a 1 pixel image that
is only
visible by alt-text when images are not loaded. 
 
Example. 

In this example, the MAP element groups a set of links. The "title"
attribute gives it a human readable label, which may be anything from
"Credits," "QuickLinks around 
our site." The "class" attribute identifies  the group as a navigation bar
(e.g., for style sheets). The link at the  beginning of the group  links to
the anchor after the group.  This link will not be necessary once user
agents allow users to jump over block content.
 
     <HEAD>
     <TITLE>How to use our site</TITLE>
     </HEAD>
     <BODY>     
       <MAP title="Site-wide navigation bar - 12 choices" class="nav"
name="navbar">    
         [<A href="#how" title="Bypass the links you have seen on every
other page and get right to the content.">Skip navigation bar.  Go to "how
to use this site."</A>]
         [<A href="home.html">Home</A>]
         [<A href="search.html">Search</A>]
         [<A href="new.html">New and highlighted</A>]
         [<A href="sitemap.html">Site map</A>]
         [ ... 8 other links ....]
       </MAP>     
       <H1><A name="how" id="how">How to use our site</A></H1>
     <!-- content of page -->     
     </BODY>     
  
  End example.
 
other options that are not as forward or backward compatible:
1. Provide a style sheet that allows users to hide the group of links. 
2. Provide a script that shows or hides the set of navigation links as
desired by the user. 


wendy chisholm
human factors engineer
trace research and development center
university of wisconsin - madison, USA

Received on Thursday, 16 September 1999 14:56:24 UTC