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RE: Unordered Lists

for

From: Jan Eric Hellbusch
Date: Aug 12, 2005 11:12AM

Hello Thomas,

> Regarding list of Links:
>
> Jan Eric Hellbusch says that:
> "JAWS and some German products treat UL as soup just as they do DIV."
>
> What I can remember, I have read the same in some Web forums/articles.
>
> Then, I cannot quite understand why Web sites - that focus on Web
> accessibility issues - use different coding techniques.

This is one of the issues, where screen readers are/were faulty. Untill 4 or
5 years ago, there was very poor support of UL, althought it is one of the
oldest HTML elements.

It's not that the screen readers don't recognize a UL or a DL, rather they
don't allow good navigation within them.

> If links of UL, DIV and DL makes Web site Navigation more
> difficult for some people (only JAWS?), then why do these
> specific Web sites use them?

DIV has no semantic relevance in that sense.

UL and DL should. And for example JAWS does recognize the lists, but
(examples):

- two ULs following each other are treated as one element, i.e. I still
don't know how a JAWS 5.1 user gets to the beginning of the second list
without starting to read from the beginnung of the first list.

- I have experienced screen readers (also JAWS 5.1) reading definition lists
in validated markup as follows: DT, DD+DT, DD+DT ... i.e. the description of
the previous term is treated as one block with the following term.

It is definately a problem in JAWS 5.1 and other screen readers.

And I wouldn't say it makes it more difficult to use a Web site when using
lists, at the present point in time it just doesn't inprove accessibility
substantially.

> 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?

I can't judge that, but they definately have a lot to do also with Office
and especially Windows. The Web (Internet Explorer) is only one application
of many.

Regs
Jan

--
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