Mordechai Peller wrote:
Before meeting David I always read that navigation should be last I ntheIt might be worth putting together a bunch of questions and doing our own (WSG members) survey of people with assorted disabilities.
source. I asked David this when he came to talk to the WSG recently and he
said emphatically:
"The navigation should go before the content".
This proves once again the difficulty of perfect accessibility. There are
personal views as to best practices. I'd go with David's view now as I
respect his knowledge and experience.
One question had me wondering of late: do screen readers read the <link> element in the <head>, do they 'see' this as a link in their list ?
Examples:
<link rel="bookmark" href="#contents" title="Read the article" /> <!-- points to the contents area -->
<link rel="bookmark" href="#navigation" title="Site Navigation" />
<link rel="search" href="#search" title="Search this site" /> <!-- points to the search box, obviously -->
I have it implemented at one of my sites [1].
This would probably be a more semantically correct way of doing 'skip links' and more - one can build a whole site map this way... Works perfectly in Mozilla, Firefox needs the link toolbar extension installed. Opera 7.5 see the search link, but misses out on the rel="bookmarks" - one needs to install a custom set up (the Moose made something like that [2]; I haven't tested it though).
IE win/mac doesn't see those <link> elements, but there is a plugin that can help [3]. Safari currently misses out completely, this might change in future versions (hopefully).
(on [1], the accessibility links are also available as a 'skip link' list, made visible for keyboard users - using css :focus).
[1] <http://emps.l-c-n.com";> [2] <http://www.literarymoose.info/=/opera/customization.xhtml> [3] <http://www.draig.de/LinkBar/index.en.html> windows only.
Philippe
---/--- Philippe Wittenbergh now live : <http://emps.l-c-n.com/> code | design | web projects : <http://www.l-c-n.com/> IE5 Mac bugs and oddities : <http://www.l-c-n.com/IE5tests/>
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