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Re: Accessible pagination

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jun 23, 2009 1:35PM

Dean Hamack wrote:

>> Specifically, the common approach (used e.g. by Google) of
>> constructs like
>> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
>> is wrong, as it puts the most important link last, after a sequence
>> of rather pointless links.
>
> Two points on this:
>
> 1. I disagree that the links are pointless. Often times when I'm
> doing a Google image search or some research, I will mark down a list
> of page numbers for a particular search result and go back to them
> later.

I think that's a rather special case. Much more often, the numbers are just
on the way when trying to find the "Next" link. Besides, you could
temporarily add the interesting pages as favorites (bookmarks) or some
similar way. The _normal_ way to process a list of result pages is
sequential.

> 2. Just to play Devil's advocate here and touch on a larger
> accessibility issue; once something becomes the "standard" and
> everyone gets use to doing it a certain way, then I would argue that
> it then becomes the "right" way to do it.

The general idea is correct, and it's one of the usability principles that
Jakob Nielsen justly recommends. But there are limits to such principles.
The 1 2 3 ... presentation used by Google is not something that people
generally use and need; rather, it is routinely ignored, except perhaps when
you wish to peek at some low-priority pages out of curiosity or for
comparison.

> Based on your points, perhaps the answer is to put the "next" and
> "previous" links before the list of page numbers in the code.

That would surely be an improvement over the approach where they appear
after the list of numbers.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/