- From: david poehlman <david.poehlman@handsontechnologeyes.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2005 07:19:47 -0500
- To: "Andy Budd" <andy@message.uk.com>, "W" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
The analogy does not fly. I repeat my question but maybe I am not being clear enough, if pages are done right, we dont need to wade through a bunch of links whether a screen reader user or for some other reason a keyboard user? A better analogy is putting in two doorways, one for some of us and one for all the rest when the building could have been constructed in such a fashion as to allow us all in through the same entrance. Yes, structure that has to be cludged is bad structure. I know all about anchors and their use and purpose and find it perfectly acceptable to have them on web pages, but not as a reason to keep bad design in the first place and not as a hack to show that someone "cares" about accessibility and those poor little finger users when all they are trying to do is to sell their legal buyers on the idea that they are in compliance with this or that. I've seen it too often. I've seen it not work, I've seen and use pages that worked quite well without it thank you very much! I hope my writing style has improved. Johnnie Apple Seed ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Budd" <andy@message.uk.com> To: "W" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org> Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 4:48 AM Subject: Re: Copywriting for Screenreaders (was Alt text for URL's) > Ok, I'll put it succinctly. If site navigation is so bad that it > needs to > be skipped, how can it be improved so that it does not need to be > skipped. Nobody is suggesting that skip links are there to deal with *bad* navigation. Sighted users have the ability to visually skip past site navigation and straight to the content by scanning the page. However screenreader users access the page in a linear fashion and can't do this (see caveat below). The point of skip navigation is to give screenrreader users the ability to jump directly to the content if that's what they want to do. Site navigation is usually made up of a number of links, all of which need to be tabbed past if using the keyboard to navigate. If you're got to tab past 20 link on each page before you reach the main content, this can be very tedious and a bar to accessibility. Some screenreaders can display heading lists. Assuming the users are familiar with this ability, it can allow them to jump to the main content in well marked up sites. Also it is possible via CSS to have the nav come last rather than first. However then people navigating via the keyboard will have to tab though the who content to get to the nav bar, which on link heavy pages, could be a nightmare (think a links page). Personally I think "skip links" are unobtrusive so I'm really not sure what your problem with them is. It's kind of like complaining about putting a lift in a building to increase accessibility because the stairs could have been made better. Andy Budd http://www.message.uk.com/
Received on Thursday, 17 February 2005 12:20:25 UTC