WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: Which should come first - navigation OR content?

for

From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Apr 25, 2006 1:00PM

What do you all think of using tabindex=1 to jump to the content, and
tabindex=2 to the navigation. Seems to me like it accomplishes the
whole lot in one attribute.



Allen Hoffman


-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Heilmann [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 8:42 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Which should come first - navigation OR content?

> Up until now I have been putting the navigation before the content in
> the HTML source and providing a 'skip nav/skip to content link' to
> give the option to skip the navigation.
> More recently I have been working on a large site (already built and
> launched) that has been built with the content first in the flow of
> HTML and the navigation last - with a 'skip to navigation' link.
> I am not sure which I feel is better - I'm inclined to think that nav
> first, content after is more conventional thus far... maybe there is
> no better option of the two.
> Your thoughts would be much appreciated!

Depends on the product I guess.

I tend to try to have content first navigation last in most of the
cases, as it is better for SEO and mobile devices while being handy for
serialised access.
For layout purposes, navigation first tends to be easier as you don't
need to float the whole page content.


--
Chris Heilmann
Blog: http://www.wait-till-i.com
Writing: http://icant.co.uk/
Binaries: http://www.onlinetools.org/