WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Current page - link or no link

for

From: Michael D. Roush
Date: Nov 30, 2005 11:00AM

Randy Pearson wrote:
>>On the pages I design using PHP, I use a string of
>> "if" statements that logically read something like this... "If the
>>navigation item is the current page, display it in the 'current page'
>>format, if not, display it as a link."
>
>
> If you can do that, couldn't you just a easily just render the link text
> without the wrapping <a>..</a> element and avoid the color-cue and other
> confusion issues?

I may not have been clear in my first post. What you are describing is
basically what I do.

If the page is, for instance, not the home page, the following is the
first text item in the navigation:

[a href="./" title="Home Page." class="nav"]Home[/a]

If the page is the home page, the following appears:
[span class="active_page"]Home[/span]

Now, I've reasoned to myself that the fact that the "Home" text will be
skipped over when someone is tabbing through the links may be good
enough to get around my thought that the only thing differentiating the
'disabled link' from the real links is the color. But, finding another
way besides a different color to let people know at a glance that a
particular navigation item is the current page makes me at least feel a
little better about the design.

Michael