Greg Kearney wrote:
It occurred to me from my own use and that of my blind wife that many
pages require the screen reader, and sighted users as well, to navigate
through a whole range of site navigation links before ever getting to
the content of the site.
On some pages, the navigation is just overwhelming and that's not good.
However, it should be easy for users to skip over groups of links or
jump to the main content of the page, without authors changing the
layout of the page. One of the basic reasons for using structured
semantic markup in the first place is to facilitate this sort of
navigation. That it isn't always easy reflects the facts that:
(A) HTML 4.x and XHTML 1.x didn't include a clear way to demarcate
navigation vs. content areas of the page. This is on the table for the
next versions of HTML and XHTML.
(B) Not all user agents and assistive technology have implemented the
relevant functionality. Examples would include JAWS and Window-Eyes
allowing you to skip over links to the next text (the N key does this in
JAWS). The group-style of navigation in VoiceOver is kind of like this,
but I guess clunkier to use.
In the CUCAT site I have attempted to deal with this by placing the
navigation links at the bottom of the page so that when you land on a
page you reach that pages content. In the event of a very long page
where the navigation would be at the bottom I will have a single link
which will take the reader to the navigation links.
It would seem to me that this approach would be better for pages
intended to be read by screen readers, as well as by the sighted rather
than have all the visual and auditory distraction of complex headers at
the top of the page to navigate through before reaching the true content
of the page.
It sounds good in theory, but practice often belies theory. Studies in
this area are rare, but one study of a small sample of users suggested
that putting navigation after content wasn't necessarily better even for
screen reader users since, just like other users, they had expected
navigation to be at the top of page. See:
http://www.usability.com.au/resources/ozewai2005/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/workingwithothers
As for sighted users, if they expect navigation to be in the top left of
the page or if their viewport is smaller than the page, then moving
navigation elsewhere could easily reduce findability of other resources
and traffic to the rest of the site.
As a general design rule I feel that webpages have become much to
complex and busy. This applies to the sighted as well as the blind.
Would you want a book in which the text flashed, moved or in some other
way animated the pages? Would you want a book in which bight coloured
text, unrelated to what you were reading littered the sides of the main
content area? The answer is, no, of course not but that is often what we
are getting from modern website design.
I don't think analogies from other media to the web are necessarily
helpful; in fact, print-based design habits have produced a lot of
inaccessibility in web design (overly small fixed fonts especially).
That said, "Don't make me think" is a great slogan for effective web
experience design.
Just some thoughts to think about.
Thanks for sharing. I'll be sure to point to this thread the next time
source order of navigation and content comes up in discussion amongst
fellow web developers. :)
--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
