WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: text links on a separate page - compliant with 508?

for

From: Chris Heilmann
Date: Mar 2, 2005 4:16AM

> Javascript flyout menus are still very popular. Another way to help
> make them accessible is to place all the the child links on a seperate
> page when the parent is clicked on.
> -Lisa

Well, that makes them better, but still not really accessible. Technical
accessibility is one thing, usable accessibility is another.

I did my own script http://www.onlinetools.org/tools/yadm/ which takes a
simple nested list and turns it into these navigations - both keyboard
and mouse accessible - something the CSS-only solutions lack.

In any case, these menus all cater for the high end user, as

1) Non-Javascript users get all the navigation of the site on each page -
this can be confusing and is useless markup. An example is
http://www.dabs.com/uk - Do you feel like tabbing through 230 links?

2) They don't have a "you are here" state in the navigation, especially
when they are multi level.

3) Generally, they make the current page link to itself, which is a bad idea.

There is a lot more, collected here:
http://www.icant.co.uk/forreview/dynamicelements/

Ironically, a really clever dynamic navigation should only give the
necessary navigation to the low end user and add the other only when
JavaScript is available, this will offer high end users the shortcut
functionality these navigations are meant to offer and not overwhelm the
low end users with lots of links they don't need.

Sadly enough it seems to be more important for a lot of developers to make
their navigations look flashy rather than usable.

--
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/