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Re: source order

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Apr 7, 2008 4:20PM

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 3:38 PM, Mike Bleasdale < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> i had thought content before nav was a best practice.

No, I wouldn't consider this a best practice. Typically, you want the
source order to be the same as the visual order. Putting content
before navigation could be problematic for several reasons:

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

- Using absolute positioning can cause other issues (pages that break
when fonts are enlarged, etc.)

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

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

- 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. This is even more problematic when you
consider that screen reader users cannot see the keyboard focus point.

I'm sure there are more reasons why this is a bad idea.

The solution is to maintain the convention of navigation first and
content later, but provide a mechanism for keyboard users to skip over
the navigation. You mention both WebAIM and WAI, both of which provide
a "Skip to main content" link as the first item on the page. To get to
the main content (and bypass the navigation) using your keyboard,
simply tab to this first link on the page, hit Enter, and you're
there. You might also look into browsers or plug-ins that allow you to
navigate by other types of elements, such as headers, forms, etc. -
these can make keyboard navigation much easier.

Jared Smith
WebAIM