RE: Lists inside nav necessary?

I would argue that a horizontal series of links is still a grouping of related items that should be conveyed programmatically. Whether or not there are bullet points or it looks like a list is irrelevant.

I assumed that Tobias only put three links in his example for brevity, and that in most cases there would be more links. I agree that link mark-up seems superfluous for short lists, but there is an argument for consistency within a website. Also, screen reader users won't be able to use the L key to find the menu if it's not marked-up as a list. Of course they could navigate by landmark, but in my experience of user testing, almost no one does. I know many of the screen reader users on this list do navigate by landmarks, but they are mostly super power users by comparison with the average user.

Steve


-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk> 
Sent: 11 June 2020 12:00
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Lists inside nav necessary?

While the answers so far are of course correct, I'd still question to an extent how "necessary" the use of lists is in very simple examples. When there are only 2-3 links or so, is it truly essential that the fact there are 2-3 links is conveyed, and the additional context of "1 of 2",
"2 of 2" before the links is not more verbose than anything else?

While 1.3.1 does require that structure conveyed visually/by layout also be conveyed programmatically...what happens when visually these links are simply shown as a horizontal series of links - no bullet points, not "list-like" layout. Simply 2-3 links on a row next to each other? 
Sometimes, "a cigar is just a cigar" and I'd argue that, for very simple cases, it's actually ok NOT to have a list. I'd certainly feel very odd dinging a site with a hard FAIL for not wrapping just 2-3 links shown in a row as a list.

(and, as an aside, note how VoiceOver actually suppresses announcements of lists when their visual list-like styling has been suppressed via CSS...so in many cases, even IF authors then go through the extra effort of conveying structural semantics, they may not actually be conveyed).

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

https://www.splintered.co.uk/ | https://github.com/patrickhlauke https://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | https://www.deviantart.com/redux

twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke

Received on Thursday, 11 June 2020 14:03:00 UTC