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Delimiting links...characters or use a DL?

for

From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Dec 16, 2004 9:10AM

I'm giving our site a 6-month tune-up and revamping a lot of the CSS to trim
it down and polishing some accessibility issues here and there.

One of the items on our site is a toolbar of links across the top. Right
now, I'm simply separating the links via the '|' character.

I've been a fan of this approach, however:

http://www.baekdal.com/example.asp

which uses a lot of definition lists (turn of your styles or look at it in
Lynx). It's a great technique for accomodating text browsers, IMHO. The
question I have is whether or not one of the two above methods is preferred
over the other to accomodate screen readers.

Listening in JAWs, the former reads as 'link SEARCH vertical bar link
ACCESSIBILITY vertical bar, etc...'

While the latter, using a DL, reads a nice title (the DT, which is hidden to
visual browser) but then reads the actual links as 'equals link SEARCH
equals link ACCESSIBILITY , etc..'

To my ears, they both sound a bit awkward. Any thoughts? Does creating it as
a DL add any higher-level page navigability for screen readers (such as
being able to link directly to a definition term?)

-Darrel