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RE: repetitive navigation

for

From: Philip Pawley
Date: Feb 13, 2003 2:31PM

H Paul,

Thank you for your comments.

I disabled the "skip" links altogether for browsers other than Explorer 5 & 6 and Netscape 7 because I couldn't see the point of a "skip" link if the keyboard focus doesn't also skip. Even Opera 7 doesn't seem to work properly in this respect - either with Tab or with W and Q.

On Netscape 4, for instance, if you use the "skip" link (say, as an example, the "skip" link on WebAIM's home page) the page scrolls just fine. The problem is that, when you tab on further, you find that the keyboard focus never budged. That seems not only pointless but positively confusing to me. Surely, it must be better to disable the skip link altogether? Anyway that's why I hid it.

There is a further confusion here. I am using xhtml 1.1. Since that requires the "id" attribute instead of "name" for anchors, _none_ of my page anchors work for older browsers. To correct this, I am planning to provide an xhtml 1.0 or html 4 version for older browsers. I haven't got the server-side scripting for that yet. So, only non-functioning page anchors for Netscape 4 as yet.

BTW the "skip"-hiding technique is pure css: no javascript there.

Do please let me know if I am missing anything with all this.


Thank you also for your interest in the fly-out sub-menu (though I wasn't intending to demo it).

It is organised differently in my forth-coming site from the present one. This is because the old technique only seemed to work reliably using fixed font-sizes and widths in the navigation bar.

In the demo page, without css positioning, the submenu appears in the navigation column as just a part of the main menu - as you suggested. Functional but _very_ ugly.

That's why, for css-capable browsers with javascript turned off, the sub-menu is invisible. Instead, as you suggest, I simply duplicated the link to the second page in the sub-menu on the body of the first page. (I put it at the top of the page and again at the bottom). You can see that on the existing site: http://www.alexanderworks.org.uk/breathing.html where I did the same thing.

Again, any further comments would be very welcome.


I hope some of this will be of use to other people too. Do, please, everyone, chip in with comments, questions, quibbles, brick-bats, whatever.

All the best,


At 12/02/03 16:22 -0700, you wrote:
>Thank you for posting this example to the list. I am intrigued by the
>possibilities of the code that you have shared with us. Your code allows
>keyboard access to a hidden "skip to main content" link, which becomes
>visible when tabbed to, and your fly-out menus are keyboard accessible as
>well. I tested it in one of my screen readers and it performed well.
>
>It appears to me that your method has quite a bit of potential. The markup
>worked as intended in Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 7. I tested it in a
>couple of other browsers, including Opera 7, Netscape 4.8, and Netscape 3,
>which did not seem to offer the same functionality as IE 6 or NS 7.
>
>I do have a question. Why is the "skip to main content" link invisible and
>(as far as I can tell) non-functional in Opera and NS 4.x? I can tell that
>you are serving out different style sheets for different browsers, so it
>seems to me that if you can't get the page to work exactly as you would
>like, you could still make the "skip to main content" link functional (and
>always visible, if necessary).
>
>If I have missed something about the design, let me know.
>
>If you can make the page work so that the "skip to main content" link is
>invisible in newer browsers except when tabbed to, and if you make it always
>visible and functional in other browsers (and in browsers with JavaScript
>turned off), you may have a very workable technique. As for the fly-out
>menu, to accommodate older browsers or browsers with JavaScript turned off,
>you'd either have to make it so that the submenu items appeared on the
>subsequent page or make it so that they appeared in the correct location on
>the page (below the menu top level link) in older browsers and when
>JavaScript is turned off.
>
>I hope that you have either already found solutions for these issues, or
>that you will be able to, because the technique has potential.
>
>Keep us posted.
>
>Paul Bohman
>Technology Coordinator
>WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind)
>www.webaim.org
>Center for Persons with Disabilities
>www.cpd.usu.edu
>Utah State University
>www.usu.edu

Philip Pawley


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