WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Unordered Lists

for

From: Thomas Jedenfelt
Date: Aug 12, 2005 11:12AM

Hello Patrick,

Thank you for your reply.

Then, I would conclude that you find UL a better choice than OL, and OL a better choice than DIV.

You said that "The problem with OL is that it implies a hierarchy/order that is not necessarily there".
Are you sure that the (your) users, nowadays, find OL more... impractical(?) that UL.

Would you say your visitors would benefit if your organisation would do a new test, to find out how newer user agents best let users navigate links? (e.g. either UL, OL, DIV, P, MAP+E or DL as navigation links)

All the best,
Thomas Jedenfelt


----- Original Message -----
From: "Patrick Lauke"
Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005
>
> > 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

--

Surf the Web in a faster, safer and easier way:
Download Opera 8 at http://www.opera.com

Powered by Outblaze