Two other possibilities for dealing with navigation are as follows.
1. Design pages which use html heading markup to clearly denote
sections/subsections. Imagine we have two divs: content and navigation.
By convention we can always place an h1 tag as the first child of the
content div. This shall, by convention, always contain a page title
(text or graphic), and by convention should be the only h1 on the page.
If subsections are needed, either within nav or content, start with h2.
This would then serve to delimit the nav section from the content, and a
screen reader capable of navigating by heading could then allow the use
to skip over the nav section with one keystroke.
Note that voiceOver does allow heading navigation in Leopard, but not in
Tiger. The other thing to note is that while heading navigation is
possible, it could be made more effective if commands for moving to
headings of a given level were added. For instance, vo +command+1 to move
to the next heading level 1, etc. Now, in our example above, we could
move to the beginning of the content by doing vo+command+1 (move to
first h1).
2. I feel the above solution is the best, since it requires little
work, and forces the developer to think about semantics, separation of
structure from presentation, and good information design. However, one
could also use CSS to force the nav to appear after the content. This
would then allow the screen reader user to find the start of the content
by going to the top of the page. You could provide a skip link to skip
to the start of the navigation.
Just my two cents.
-- Rich
----- Original Message ----- From: "Greg Kearney" <gkearney@xxxxxxxxx>
To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X
by the blind" <discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "macvoiceover"
<macvoiceover@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>; "Andrew Furlong" <Andrew.Furlong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "Iain
Murray" <i.murray@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; <elise@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2008 1:31 PM
Subject: [macvoiceover] A discussion on navigation, content and web
pages
I have a done a short segment on the topic of navigation, content and
web pages which can be found at: http://cucat.org/projects/navigation/
Greg Kearney
535 S. Jackson St.
Casper, Wyoming 82601
307-224-4022
gkearney@xxxxxxxxx
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