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

Ben Gustafson Ben_Gustafson at lionbridge.com
Fri Sep 13 11:10:01 CDT 2002


--
[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
Ben Gustafson wrote:
>>> [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?

Joshua Olson wrote:
>> 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...

David Kaufman wrote:
> 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.

Just goes to show me that what is "harder to navigate" for the sited may be
easier to navigate for the visually impaired, and vice versa.

--Ben



More information about the thelist mailing list