Re: linked list alternative to nested menus

David Poehlman:
> I would agree with the uncluttered approach.  It lends its self to 
> wider device independance.
>
I concur. I always recommend against including a site map on every page 
as a navigation device, regardless of how you mark it up.

Paul started a similar conversation to this one on the WSG list 
recently where Ian Anderson offered the following opinion based on his 
usability testing with screen reader users:

> I think this would be immensely bad design for screen reader users. 
> This is a site map. What you may be missing is that too many links are 
> the bane of a screen reader user's life. They rely on using links as a 
> kind of binary tree to navigate the site - the last thing they benefit 
> from is hearing links again that they have already discarded as not of 
> interest. They go back much more than sighted users in order to find a 
> link they heard before.
>
> The other interesting thing is that screen reader users build a mental 
> map of a site that is nothing like the real architecture, based on the 
> links they hear. If every link is on every page, all pages sound the 
> same to them, because about half of a user's time on each page is 
> spent listing the links. When the links on each page are mostly 
> unique, screen reader users perform better in tasks.

source: 
http://www.mail-archive.com/wsg@webstandardsgroup.org/msg25775.html

kind regards
Terrence Wood.

Received on Tuesday, 14 March 2006 20:18:54 UTC