Ian Anderson:
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.
This is great, I'd really like to send this as a reply every time
someone asks about dropdown menus ;-)
The lack of uniqueness in link labels and too much navigation (e.g. the
site map on every page) affects all users not just screen reader users.
I recently completed user testing for a navigation system with 165+
links in it. Most tasks were eventually completed though not without
error(s). We observed a lot of backtracking, confusion over similar
(i.e not unique enough) labels and false positives (where users were
confident the task was complete but they were not in the prescribed
location). Most users requested additional contextual information (e.g.
tooltips, or deks). So indications are, IMO (based on this, and my
recent reading of Spool on global navigation) that less global
navigation, and more contextual navigation is generally better for
content rich sites.
kind regards
Terrence Wood.
******************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm
for some hints on posting to the list & getting help
******************************************************
