If breadcrumbs are to sight site hierarchy then they are utterly useless in my opinion which is that they are mostly useless anyway. I rarely state opinions but maintain that good design is predicated on clean structure such that it is not necessary to have this kind of hack.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by theblind" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2008 3:39 AM Subject: Re: Designing web pages for screen readers David Poehlman wrote: > You obviously have some knowledge of this field and I respect that. There > is no best way however and I am still learning after over 10 years in the > field. Agreed, every designer and developer have their individual approaches and I'm learning new stuff every day. ;) > Users with "average" vision are dwindling and they too stumble on highly > busy pages. I agree everyone can be wrongfooted by overly busy pages. > You ask about alternatives to breadcrumbs and they do exist and can be > more > effective but for some reason, breadcrums became the norm. First, > something > really powerful is the page title. I do think TITLE element contents should be designed around site structure. However, I don't view that as an alternative to breadcrumbs. You can't click items in a TITLE structure. And, especially if you're at an article with a long title itself, there's a good chance your window will be too small to show a TITLE listing the structure. > Next, there can be a little map of the > site that shows where you are in the site and even where you've been that > you can ask for. Yeah, don't make me click, but I'd rather click than be > cluttered. I think a little map sounds like way more clutter than a list of links, but do you have an example? Note that the name is deceptive in that breadcrumbs ideally aren't about "where you've been" (a history trail) but instead express the site hierarchy (which isn't necessarily where you've been at all). In addition to the useit article I cited previously see: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=breadcrumbs -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
