- From: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:42:33 -0700
- To: "'Alastair Campbell'" <ac@nomensa.com>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Alastair Campbell wrote: > > Apart from the in-escapable factors of drop-down/out menus (e.g. > hiding options), I haven't been able to fault it. Although, this is a > tough audience, maybe someone else will spot something ;) Ah yes, brothercake's Ultimate Drop Down Menu. >From a technical perspective, this is pretty bullet-proof and has been widely tested and deployed. Brothercake (aka James Edwards) is committed to web standards and has more than a passing understanding of web accessibility issues. The issue with this type of navigation scheme is that it allows content developers to visually "hide away" a lot of information that would otherwise cause a sensory overload. But for non-visual, non-standard user agents/renderings, those very same links are still there. It becomes a point at which there is simply too much information for any human to deal with, blind or otherwise - it is a cognitive issue. I had the opportunity to do a review of a navigation prototype for a large US company that actually used brothercake's UDDM, and the dev team then crammed 182 separate links into the nav-bar. *182!!* (Mental picture of John screaming and pulling his very short hair out). And so Alastair, while I can't technically fault the code, content creators need to be cautioned about using this type of solution - proceed with caution, and please, for the love of all that is sacred *DO NOT* slam 182 links into the menu bar. JF --- John Foliot Academic Technology Specialist Stanford Online Accessibility Program http://soap.stanford.edu Stanford University 560 Escondido Mall Meyer Library 181 Stanford, CA 94305-3093
Received on Thursday, 19 October 2006 17:42:55 UTC