Thread Subject: Re: Group D: 22(o) skip navigation

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From: David Poehlman
Date: Sat, Feb 24 2007 9:20 AM

I think here we need to stick close to the mark. This particular
provision has run affoul of many for good reason. It has
disadvantages in thiit forceed authors to do something somewhat
disruptive to their code. Often, because of this and other
considerations, it was made to be invisible even though it wis
possible for users who can see to benefit from the mechanism. Often,
it just plain does not work either due to lack of support by the
browser or because of incorrect markup.

Having said all that, what should we do with 22? We should turn it
into:
"a method shal be provided to facilitate the efficient use of pages
by allowing contentt which has changed to be read before any
repetative content is read automatically and if manual effort is
being used that mmarkup shall be provided too identify repetative
content. I know that this is too long, but my point is that the
issue we have is one of author, user agent and user all playing
together. The author needs to be able to confidently develop
ccontent without being told too muchh what to put in it. The user
agent needs something to pass to the user in order to make the
experienc rich and efficient. The user nneeds to be able to go to
the important parts of content, too often, we skip nav and then
realize there is something there we need or don't know it's there
bbecause we never look.

On Feb 23, 2007, at 5:56 PM, Smith, Jamie wrote:

First is it okay to bring up issues that were discussed on the wiki
that is still in the web and websoft committee? If yes...

I've been looking through the wiki and couldn't tell if the discuss
regarding the current requirement of skip navigation ended up
including some type of structured navigation included in the draft.


Current wording

22(o) A method shall be provided that permits users to skip
repetitive navigation links.


Discussion

I would definitely like to see this particular wording include
structured navigation using H tags to group navigation elements and
unordered or order lists. So many front pages today have many, many
links... some in the 100s. A person with speech needs to read them
when folks code for the sighted users only. But pages like the
empowerment zone, has the same large group (don't think they user
list format) and yet I was pointed to it by speech users that found
it navigatable. At this point I'm redoing my site using style sheets
and have only a small global menu and a local menu with the look and
feel of buttons. It was easy for me to use a "hidden" H 2 class for
the local menu.


Possible wording

A method shall be provided that permits users to skip repetitive
navigation links. Navigation elements should be established using
order or unordered lists. When there are more than X links on a
page, navigation elements should be coded using h tags.

I'm not sure if the order and unordered list helps speech users. But
I believe it would make it easier to test a site. Maybe not, cause I
use order and unordered list for other things as well.




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