WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Unordered Lists

for

From: Patrick Lauke
Date: Aug 12, 2005 11:12AM


> Jan Eric Hellbusch says that:
> "JAWS and some German products treat UL as soup just as they do DIV."

I haven't got JAWS on my machine any more, but I seemed to remember that
it would read out "List with X items" and then work through each item
sequentially. Also, in JAWS at least, you can skip the entire UL in one
go with the "L" keystroke (next list). So I'm a bit stumped
that Jan likens them to generic DIVs.

> Can it be that they give higher priority to Technical issues
> (their interpretation of W3C's HTML Specification on mark-up
> and structuring content and WAI's WCAG) and/or Site Design,
> rather than User Experience tests?

We had an admittedly small group of 3 screen reader users look over our
early designs, which includes a UL based navigation, and they all had
nothing but positive (or at least neutral) things to say about that
specific aspect.

> _Non_ of the below Web sites use OL (as recommended by Jan,
> and others!?) for lists of Links.

The problem with OL is that it implies a hierarchy/order that is not
necessarily there; i.e. if I have

1 home
2 products
3 about
4 contact

I'd say that there is an implication of the order in which these sections
should be seen (step 1, step 2, etc) and/or that products are more important
(higher up in the hierarchy) than the about or contact...but I won't get
overly pedantic on this, as it's open to interpretation IMHO.

Patrick
___________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk
___________
Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
___________