Re: [WSG] accessible drill-down into a nested list

[Ian Anderson]

Paul Novitski wrote:

Tell me if this would be a better scenario:  When you select a menu 
item, the page reloads with a set of breadcrumbs that spells out the 
history of selected menu items, such as:

I think you are correct to be concerned about the issue, but this may
not be the optimal solution. If you consider the requirements of a
screen reader user, their task is one of wading through immense amounts
of irrelevant stuff trying to find the thing of interest at that moment.

What's of most interest at the moment you're describing is hearing the
*new* options that are now available.

The breadcrumb (hierarchical location) is also hugely appreciated as a
means of keeping track of where they are in the site.

From user testing we've done with screen reader users, the most
important thing is that the page title and main heading on the page are
descriptive. The page title is read first as the page loads, and then
the behaviour depends on the screen reader in use. JAWS will typically
skip over stuff that has been seen before, and try to jump to the first
new content on the page. If the page title and heading don't change, 
this can be very destructive for these users, as they start trying to 
backtrack or reload the page to see what has gone wrong.

In the scenario you describe, is the page more or less identical except
that a new submenu has appeared in the navigation area? I think this
would be very harmful UI for screen reader users. The chances of them
locating the submenu are remote, and the chances of them realising that
it represents hierarchically subordinate options are too.

The best solution for these users may be to create menu pages that
contain the submenu links as primary content.

Ensuring that navigation links come after content links in the source 
order may also be very beneficial, as these "downward" or "onward" links 
are much more likely to be what the user is looking for.

Somewhere else on the page, perhaps last in the markup, would be the 
full menu including all menu items at each selected level.  A "jump
to navigation" link early on the page could get you there quickly.

I think this would be immensely bad design for screen reader users. This 
is a site map. What you may be missing is that too many links are the 
bane of a screen reader user's life. They rely on using links as a kind 
of binary tree to navigate the site - the last thing they benefit from 
is hearing links again that they have already discarded as not of 
interest. They go back much more than sighted users in order to find a 
link they heard before.

The other interesting thing is that screen reader users build a mental 
map of a site that is nothing like the real architecture, based on the 
links they hear. If every link is on every page, all pages sound the 
same to them, because about half of a user's time on each page is spent 
listing the links. When the links on each page are mostly unique, screen 
reader users perform better in tasks.

So, have a site map linked off each page, but don't include extra links 
on every page - these are bad for screen reader users, not helpful, in 
my opinion

Hope this helps

Cheers

ian

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