[thelist] Perkins School for the Blind's new site

David Kaufman david at gigawatt.com
Fri Sep 13 10:30:01 CDT 2002


Joshua Olson <joshua at waetech.com> wrote:
>
> From: "Ben Gustafson" <Ben_Gustafson at lionbridge.com>
>> [re: http://www.perkins.pvt.k12.ma.us ]
>> I was struck, though, by its lack of a traditional navigation bar,
>> relying instead on the home page or site map (along with links
>> within the current section at the bottom of the page). Does an
>> accessible site need to be harder to navigate?
>
> I can see why they do this.  The screen reader will get to the content
> quicker without having to read the redundant navigation on every
> page.  They probably could've accomplished the same thing by putting
> the navigation on the right hand side or did some sort of table trick
> or floating div trick to put the nav on the left while still having
> it farther down the HTML code...

exactly.  i had a blind visitor to one of my sites email me once to ask for
a single accessibility feature: placing a "skip navigation" link before the
left navigation menu, which was in a left-table-cell of course and quite
long.  he was quite used to sites doing this but added that listening to his
screen reader recite the entire nav-menu before the content of each page on
most sites was quite frustrating.

to add this feature for screen-reader users, i ended up placing a 1-pixel
transaparent gif just before the first link in the nav menu, which was
linked something like this:
<a href ="#afternav"><img src="1pix.gif" alt="skip past menu"></a>

this resulted in screen-reader users getting a chance to follow this link
right over and past the nav menu, and get right to the reading the rest of
the page.

the link of course was undetectable to "visual" visitors, but quite handy to
the screen-reader users!

i read recently about similar "skip-links" being added *to* a left
navigation menu which was long and contained the commonly used list of
top-level "main sections" with nested "sub-pages" indented beneath them.  in
this case the developer used dhtml to show and hide the sub-lists, but the
whole fully-expanded "tree" was being read by screen-readers, so adding
invisible "skip-to-next-section" links after each top-level link (but before
the sub-links) allowed the blind folks to "collapse" the tree too!  and use
the menu much as we do, skimming the highlights, then drilling down to the
sub-sections that are of interest.

> ...Their approach to having a link to the
> navigation is someone novel and kinda neat.  I applaud the effort.

very cool stuff, indeed


-dave





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