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Re: Fw: source order

for

From: Ron Stewart
Date: Apr 7, 2008 6:00PM

Good evening, generally I am just an observer on this list since my web
design skills are no longer what they need to be.

I have been following this thread with a bit of interest and it is somewhat
amazing to me to see the assumptions being made about the technical
sophistication and expertise of the average person with a "disability". In
my experience most folks just want to use the pages with the minimum of fuss
and muss. To expect folks to have an individual preference page to
deterimine their preferred presentation style is somewhat idealistic. To
have them regularly turn these pages off and on is a bit far fetched. Good
design goes a long way to accessibility and in fact in most instances
overcomes a multitude of sins primarily driven by web designers not any
practical application of underlying technology.

Let me put in a very real example here, my grandmum has pretty much lost her
vision and wants to use website "x". What needs to be done to the site that
allows her to do so. Her visit to a site is going to be determined by the
number of times she has visited a site. If she is well acquainted with the
site perhaps she has set a favorite to the subsite of her choice but if she
has not then how will she find what she needs without pressing the tab key a
thousand times?

Perhaps I am being naïve here, but give me a few skip navs if necessary.
Visual ones please do not hide them for me, because all are not screen
readers and design your sites for optimum usability not to show technical
prowness.

Ron Stewart



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of John Watts
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 7:30 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Fw: source order

Hi,

Interesting discussion indeed. I'd like to make a couple points:

>- It's a pain to code unless you use CSS and absolute positioning.

CSS yes, absolute positioning no. Many other modern layouts use floats (a
couple links below). In an ideal world, table-driven designs should be
consigned to the scrap heap.

>If users disable styles, suddenly the order is different than what they saw
visually.

I'm not sure when users would be constantly enabling and disabling styles. I
would have assumed that users would have the page styled to accommodate
their disability and leave it (screen styles for the deaf, unstyled for
users of braille readers, and perhaps soon the speech styles for the blind).
If there is some value to enabling and then disabling and then enabling
styles as you visit each page, please let me know.

>It breaks the convention used by probably 99.9% of web sites

Layout repositories contain many templates that place the nav before
content. The eminent A List Apart has even published a couple modern CSS
layouts which do just that.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail

I can't say that most sites are ordering their source like this, but I'm
certain they number much more than 0.1%

>Now, instead of having to navigate to or past navigation (which should be
fairly consistent) in order to find the
>content, users must now navigate through an unknown and variable number of
links in content to find
>the navigation.

If I go to a page, am I most interested in the content of the page or its
navigation menu? Should I have to constantly tab through the nav to reach
the stuff I'm really interested in? And what if the nav is really long? The
size of the nav could vary as it opens new sub-menus as you navigate deeper
into the site, I've certainly seen (for better or worse) extremely large nav
menus.

The points made in favour of placing the content first are better explained
by someone much more eloquent than I (Mark Pilgrim is a former accessibility
architect for IBM).
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_10_presenting_your_main_content_first.h
tml

In addition to Pilgrim's examples, the OP seemed to indicate that with his
mobility impairment, tabbing through the stuff he doesn't want to get to the
stuff he does want is not ideal for him.

Regards,

John








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