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

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From: Christian Heilmann
Date: Mar 2, 2005 2:35PM


>: That'll make it hard to keep a connection between the links though. A
>: nested list tells me which links belong to which main section, listing
>: the main sections first and the sub sections later will make it more
>: confusing.
>
>True, that is a potential problem. Given that we are talking about a
>situation where there are 100 links or more, and let's say, grouped into 10
>groups of 10. How about this....?
>
>The first list is of the 10 groups. The next 10 lists are each of the 10
>groups. The first group is named "top", each subsequent group is named
>something like the group it is in. In the "top" list, each list item is one
>of the 10 groups, and the text is a link to that group.
>
>In each of the 10 "group" lists, the first 10 list items are the links that
>belong in the group. Then, the final list item(s) are navigational in
>nature ("Previous Group (named)", "Top", "Next Group (named)").
>
>I'm just sorta brainstorming, but it seems like a reasonable way to go for a
>very large group of links.
>
>
How usable is a very very large group of links though? What you are
talking about is a portal/catalogue yahoo style.
Yes, the way you described it does make sense. However, a search is in
this case a much better option, or a drill down into categories.
I'd really like to see user numbers on links in catalogues compared to
search engine users. Personally I can never be bothered searching for
links, I either try type-ahead or the search directly.

A lot of "we need this navigation" works together with "we need to add
all that onto the page", whereas the "as a visitor, I want this" is
another issue.

Currently I am working on a redesign of a council web sites. Councils
are required by their own guidelines to offer 152 different services and
make information about them available on the web site. A lot of
council web sites list the top 29 categories as the navigation,
including the one we redesign. The user numbers are abysmal and the
calls by phone many. Our first step was to ditch the 29 categories and
offer group-oriented navigation: "council xyz for seniors, for teens,
for parents" and so on, and voila, the first two rounds of usability
testing showed 90% satisfactory results in tasks.

It is tempting to go technical with navigation, but the most important
thing is to realise who it is for.