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Thread: Fw: source order
Number of posts in this thread: 8 (In chronological order)
From: John Watts
Date: Mon, Apr 07 2008 5:40PM
Subject: Fw: source order
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Hi,
Interesting discussion indeed. I'd like to make a couple points:
>- It's a pain to code unless you use CSS and absolute positioning.
CSS yes, absolute positioning no. Many other modern layouts use floats (a couple links below). In an ideal world, table-driven designs should be consigned to the scrap heap.
>If users disable styles, suddenly the order is different than what they saw visually.
I'm not sure when users would be constantly enabling and disabling styles. I would have assumed that users would have the page styled to accommodate their disability and leave it (screen styles for the deaf, unstyled for users of braille readers, and perhaps soon the speech styles for the blind). If there is some value to enabling and then disabling and then enabling styles as you visit each page, please let me know.
>It breaks the convention used by probably 99.9% of web sites
Layout repositories contain many templates that place the nav before content. The eminent A List Apart has even published a couple modern CSS layouts which do just that.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail
I can't say that most sites are ordering their source like this, but I'm certain they number much more than 0.1%
>Now, instead of having to navigate to or past navigation (which should be fairly consistent) in order to find the
>content, users must now navigate through an unknown and variable number of links in content to find
>the navigation.
If I go to a page, am I most interested in the content of the page or its navigation menu? Should I have to constantly tab through the nav to reach the stuff I'm really interested in? And what if the nav is really long? The size of the nav could vary as it opens new sub-menus as you navigate deeper into the site, I've certainly seen (for better or worse) extremely large nav menus.
The points made in favour of placing the content first are better explained by someone much more eloquent than I (Mark Pilgrim is a former accessibility architect for IBM).
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_10_presenting_your_main_content_first.html
In addition to Pilgrim's examples, the OP seemed to indicate that with his mobility impairment, tabbing through the stuff he doesn't want to get to the stuff he does want is not ideal for him.
Regards,
John
Get the name you always wanted with the new y7mail email address.
www.yahoo7.com.au/y7mail
From: Ron Stewart
Date: Mon, Apr 07 2008 6:00PM
Subject: Re: Fw: source order
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Good evening, generally I am just an observer on this list since my web
design skills are no longer what they need to be.
I have been following this thread with a bit of interest and it is somewhat
amazing to me to see the assumptions being made about the technical
sophistication and expertise of the average person with a "disability". In
my experience most folks just want to use the pages with the minimum of fuss
and muss. To expect folks to have an individual preference page to
deterimine their preferred presentation style is somewhat idealistic. To
have them regularly turn these pages off and on is a bit far fetched. Good
design goes a long way to accessibility and in fact in most instances
overcomes a multitude of sins primarily driven by web designers not any
practical application of underlying technology.
Let me put in a very real example here, my grandmum has pretty much lost her
vision and wants to use website "x". What needs to be done to the site that
allows her to do so. Her visit to a site is going to be determined by the
number of times she has visited a site. If she is well acquainted with the
site perhaps she has set a favorite to the subsite of her choice but if she
has not then how will she find what she needs without pressing the tab key a
thousand times?
Perhaps I am being naïve here, but give me a few skip navs if necessary.
Visual ones please do not hide them for me, because all are not screen
readers and design your sites for optimum usability not to show technical
prowness.
Ron Stewart
-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of John Watts
Sent: Monday, April 07, 2008 7:30 PM
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Subject: [WebAIM] Fw: source order
Hi,
Interesting discussion indeed. I'd like to make a couple points:
>- It's a pain to code unless you use CSS and absolute positioning.
CSS yes, absolute positioning no. Many other modern layouts use floats (a
couple links below). In an ideal world, table-driven designs should be
consigned to the scrap heap.
>If users disable styles, suddenly the order is different than what they saw
visually.
I'm not sure when users would be constantly enabling and disabling styles. I
would have assumed that users would have the page styled to accommodate
their disability and leave it (screen styles for the deaf, unstyled for
users of braille readers, and perhaps soon the speech styles for the blind).
If there is some value to enabling and then disabling and then enabling
styles as you visit each page, please let me know.
>It breaks the convention used by probably 99.9% of web sites
Layout repositories contain many templates that place the nav before
content. The eminent A List Apart has even published a couple modern CSS
layouts which do just that.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/multicolumnlayouts
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail
I can't say that most sites are ordering their source like this, but I'm
certain they number much more than 0.1%
>Now, instead of having to navigate to or past navigation (which should be
fairly consistent) in order to find the
>content, users must now navigate through an unknown and variable number of
links in content to find
>the navigation.
If I go to a page, am I most interested in the content of the page or its
navigation menu? Should I have to constantly tab through the nav to reach
the stuff I'm really interested in? And what if the nav is really long? The
size of the nav could vary as it opens new sub-menus as you navigate deeper
into the site, I've certainly seen (for better or worse) extremely large nav
menus.
The points made in favour of placing the content first are better explained
by someone much more eloquent than I (Mark Pilgrim is a former accessibility
architect for IBM).
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_10_presenting_your_main_content_first.h
tml
In addition to Pilgrim's examples, the OP seemed to indicate that with his
mobility impairment, tabbing through the stuff he doesn't want to get to the
stuff he does want is not ideal for him.
Regards,
John
Get the name you always wanted with the new y7mail email address.
www.yahoo7.com.au/y7mail
From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Mon, Apr 07 2008 7:20PM
Subject: Re: source order
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Jared Smith wrote:
> - Using absolute positioning can cause other issues (pages that break
> when fonts are enlarged, etc.)
unless you're careful and also use relative units for your absolute
positioning - which sounds like a paradox, but actually works nicely.
> - If users disable styles, suddenly the order is different than what
> they saw visually.
even more common: a sighted user that has stylesheets enabled and
expects the visual tab order to match the onscreen layout may well be
confused if it isn't the case.
A "mechanism/method to skip" has been mentioned in relation to 508. This
is also in WCAG 2. Worth noting, though, that this mechanism doesn't
necessarily have to be something that the developer actively provides
(e.g. a skip link), but it can be (at least for WCAG 2) simply grouping
things in logical containers (e.g. marking up navbar as a list) and/or
adding headers before the navigation and the content...the active
skipping can then be taken care of by assistive technology, for instance.
P
--
Patrick H. Lauke
______________________________________________________________
re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
[latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
http://redux.deviantart.com
______________________________________________________________
Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________
To manage your subscription, visit http://list.webaim.org/
Address list messages to = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
From: Mike Bleasdale
Date: Tue, Apr 08 2008 5:50AM
Subject: Re: source order
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thank you all for the replies. skip links are great but still not
implemented enough. as i tab through a site, i personally like reaching the
content. i am cued to what has focus by the browser applying a dashed
background. i believe that all the blogger templates are created like that
which makes it easier for me. i had thought that since most web development
bloggers ... zeldman, css zen garden, cedarholm ...etc appear to put content
ahead of anything in the sides, that was proper. it seems that many have a
small nav in the masthead which is easy to tab past but it is the large navs
in the side that are more troublesome. i do use firefox however which lets
me jump to any link by typing it out. when i have to use ie...it is more of
a pain. thanks
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:14 PM, Patrick H. Lauke < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
wrote:
> Jared Smith wrote:
>
> > - Using absolute positioning can cause other issues (pages that break
> > when fonts are enlarged, etc.)
>
> unless you're careful and also use relative units for your absolute
> positioning - which sounds like a paradox, but actually works nicely.
>
> > - If users disable styles, suddenly the order is different than what
> > they saw visually.
>
> even more common: a sighted user that has stylesheets enabled and
> expects the visual tab order to match the onscreen layout may well be
> confused if it isn't the case.
>
> A "mechanism/method to skip" has been mentioned in relation to 508. This
> is also in WCAG 2. Worth noting, though, that this mechanism doesn't
> necessarily have to be something that the developer actively provides
> (e.g. a skip link), but it can be (at least for WCAG 2) simply grouping
> things in logical containers (e.g. marking up navbar as a list) and/or
> adding headers before the navigation and the content...the active
> skipping can then be taken care of by assistive technology, for instance.
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
>
From: John Watts
Date: Tue, Apr 08 2008 6:50AM
Subject: Re: source order
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To play both sides of the fence here, I think it is impossible to deliver information to everyone in the manner they want. People use the web differently and have their own pre-defined notions of convention based either on personal preference, past experience, or disability. I have heard from users of screen readers that they expect the nav menu to come first in source order, only to hear the next day from a user of a braille device that he prefers the content to be as close to the top as possible. Some with mobility impairments, like the OP, prefer tabbing to content first, perhaps others also have decided by convention that they would like to reach the navigation first. I use a mobile device to read blogs and RSS feeds, I certainly appreciate not having to scroll down excessively to get to the content I'm really interested in.
I do believe that this expectation of source order is a hold-over from table-based designs. Now that many sites (and there are many - as the OP mentioned, how many Blogger blogs are out there?) have re-arranged their source, I would like to know exactly how much of an obstacle this is to users of different assistive technologies. My anecdotal evidence suggests not much, often it is the opposite, but I would be interested in any research any organization has done into the matter. I have only seen the study produced by usability.com.au, and it dealt only with users of screen readers, had a small sample of individuals, and made a few assumptions based on a single participant.
In a perfect world, perhaps we could shape the source order to a user's preference with XML/XSLT, but it would appear the wild and wooly days of the web aren't over yet.
----- Original Message ----
From: Mike Bleasdale < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: WebAIM Discussion List < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Tuesday, 8 April, 2008 8:40:24 AM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] source order
thank you all for the replies. skip links are great but still not
implemented enough. as i tab through a site, i personally like reaching the
content. i am cued to what has focus by the browser applying a dashed
background. i believe that all the blogger templates are created like that
which makes it easier for me. i had thought that since most web development
bloggers ... zeldman, css zen garden, cedarholm ...etc appear to put content
ahead of anything in the sides, that was proper. it seems that many have a
small nav in the masthead which is easy to tab past but it is the large navs
in the side that are more troublesome. i do use firefox however which lets
me jump to any link by typing it out. when i have to use ie...it is more of
a pain. thanks
On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:14 PM, Patrick H. Lauke < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
wrote:
> Jared Smith wrote:
>
> > - Using absolute positioning can cause other issues (pages that break
> > when fonts are enlarged, etc.)
>
> unless you're careful and also use relative units for your absolute
> positioning - which sounds like a paradox, but actually works nicely.
>
> > - If users disable styles, suddenly the order is different than what
> > they saw visually.
>
> even more common: a sighted user that has stylesheets enabled and
> expects the visual tab order to match the onscreen layout may well be
> confused if it isn't the case.
>
> A "mechanism/method to skip" has been mentioned in relation to 508. This
> is also in WCAG 2. Worth noting, though, that this mechanism doesn't
> necessarily have to be something that the developer actively provides
> (e.g. a skip link), but it can be (at least for WCAG 2) simply grouping
> things in logical containers (e.g. marking up navbar as a list) and/or
> adding headers before the navigation and the content...the active
> skipping can then be taken care of by assistive technology, for instance.
>
> P
> --
> Patrick H. Lauke
> ______________________________________________________________
> re·dux (adj.): brought back; returned. used postpositively
> [latin : re-, re- + dux, leader; see duke.]
> www.splintered.co.uk | www.photographia.co.uk
> http://redux.deviantart.com
> ______________________________________________________________
> Co-lead, Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
> http://webstandards.org/
> ______________________________________________________________
> _______________________________________________
> To manage your subscription, visit http://list.webaim.org/
> Address list messages to = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
>
_______________________________________________
To manage your subscription, visit http://list.webaim.org/
Address list messages to = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Get the name you always wanted with the new y7mail email address.
www.yahoo7.com.au/y7mail
_______________________________________________
To manage your subscription, visit http://list.webaim.org/
Address list messages to = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
From: DAVOUD TOHIDY
Date: Tue, Apr 08 2008 7:40AM
Subject: Re: Fw: source order
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Hi,
There is a difference between the following two texts for skip links:
"Skip to Content" and "Skip to Main Content"
as described in Guideline 10 of the following briliant article:
http://redish.net/content/papers/interactions.html
So I believe the best practice would be to use "Skip to Main Content" before
all elemnets in the source code while keeping the navigation before the main
content in the source because we do not want to create problem for some
users by fixing a problem for others.
@Jared:
As for the Absolute positioning, I do agree that there are
plenty of sites on the internet which have not coded properly.
However please visit my portfoilo at:
http://cssfreelancer.awardspace.com
and let me know if i need to fix anything in regards to absolute pos.
But you may be pointing at fixed positioning which then you will be correct
most of the times.
>I think you need to be careful to not provide too many "skip" links.
I agree. As long as they are just a couple, that should be o.k otherwise
they will need their own skip link :)
>I've always wondered - if you have 4 "skip" links on each page, would
>these qualify as "repetitive links" and thus require their own "Skip
>the skip links" link according to Section 508? ;-)
I wouldn't think so. That is correct only if you link to the same spot
on the same page I believe. If you link to different locations with different
content on the same page it shouldn't be considered as "repetitive links",
because your URLs will be different such as:
http://www.mysite.com/#nav
http://www.mysite.com/#footer etc.
@Ron Stewart :
>Perhaps I am being naïve here, but give me a few skip navs if necessary.
No you are not naive. You are absolutely correct. But wait, whether or not
skip link is the only mechanism your crandma needs is the question.
A site can be organized so that users can access to the different location
easily. I would be very interested in hearing about any difficulties your grandma
faces when she uses my portfolio which I provided the URL before.
@Patrick H. Lauke :
Thumbs up :)
@John Watts :
> I'm not sure when users would be constantly enabling and disabling styles.
I believe Patrick gave you a sample. Another one would be a visually impaired
user tapping on the ctrl+ and etc. to size up the current font to make it
more readable.
However when she does that, she founds a lot of overlaps etc. making the content
unreadable and unusable.
best
davoud
P.S.: To support my research please visit the following link:
http://cssfreelancer.awardspace.com/stability.html
From: Jared Smith
Date: Tue, Apr 08 2008 7:50AM
Subject: Re: source order
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On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 5:40 AM, Mike Bleasdale < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> i am cued to what has focus by the browser applying a dashed background.
Well, at least most of the time. I just blogged on the increasing
implementation of code that hides the focus indicator -
http://webaim.org/blog/plague-of-outline-0/
The best solution to all of this is and will be the inclusion of role
definitions in ARIA and XHTML2 and the section elements in HTML5.
These allow you to mark-up page sections as navigation, main content,
etc., thus allowing user agents the ability to navigate directly to
them.
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#sections
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/#roleattribute_inherits
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xhtml-role-20071004/#s_role_module_attributes
Jared Smith
WebAIM
From: John Foliot - Stanford Online Accessibility Program
Date: Thu, Apr 10 2008 12:40PM
Subject: Re: Fw: source order
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Ron Stewart wrote:
>
> Let me put in a very real example here, my grandmum has pretty much
> lost her vision and wants to use website "x". What needs to be done
> to the site that allows her to do so. Her visit to a site is going
> to be determined by the number of times she has visited a site. If
> she is well acquainted with the site perhaps she has set a favorite
> to the subsite of her choice but if she has not then how will she
> find what she needs without pressing the tab key a thousand times?
>
I think Ron has made an interesting point here, and one that *may* be
germane to this discussion: frequency.
One of the oldest "rules" in the book is to know your audience - yes, I
know, on the WWW that *can* be anyone - but you have a target audience that
you are seeking to attract, and so start there. If this audience is
anticipated to be a multiple-visit-returning audience, then tucking your nav
block down at the bottom of your source code, with one simple link to that
block ("Go to Site Navigation") at the top of your source code can make a
lot of sense. It brings those users who experience web content in a linear
fashion straight to the "meat"; the down side of course is that for first
time or infrequent users who surf linearly, they need to actually skip down
over the meat to get to the navigation first, but is this a "hardship"?
Depends... on a lot of things - and knowing your audience can help you
determine that answer.
What happens if the key content on your page/site is accessed frequently via
a hand-held device such as a cell phone? Getting to the "meat" then is
probably more important than wading through X number of links to navigate
around.
So while I generally concur with most of the other contributors to this
thread who have suggested that most often placing navigation at the "top" is
an expected convention, it in no means suggests that the other way 'round is
wrong. It is a decisions that you as content creator must make an informed
decision about... Based on your audience and content.
My $0.02 FWIW
JF