[Sigia-l] RE: "Standard" Intranet site sections?

[Taylor, Brett]

Why is there a need to show all nav structure from the landing page, I
do like fly outs when appropriately applied, but if labels were more
intuitive, there would be an understanding of what to find under that
grouping and so to click on a link and be moved to the second lever and
finding what's there isn't a big deal.

It seems to me we are making things more complicated and useless by
trying to make things more usable, if that makes sense. But I guess you
have to take each project one by one and determine if fly outs are
usable or not. I can't imagine why on a site where seniors are the
biggest user group fly outs would be used, it seems trying to implement
a cool function took precedence over usability.

brett 


brett taylor + R O U N D A R C H + bus 312.529.2502 + mob 773.844.5233


-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Douglas Brashear
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 12:11 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] RE: "Standard" Intranet site sections?

Hello all,

Long time lurker, first time poster.  Regarding the usability of
submenus, I've recently dealt with this issue at my client, a large
Federal agency (to remain nameless). Their website content is used
mainly by seniors (not giving it away, I hope) and my criticism of their
current submenus is that the mouse-over area that activates the submenu
is too small to be usable by those with motor skills impairments. In
this case, some of the left side navigation bar items have submenus and
some don't, and the icon used to represent the availability of a submenu
is small and not intuitive. I'd much rather them adopt a new second
level in their page hierarchy, one that provides navigation to more
specific areas with more readily viewable (and possibly categorized)
hyperlinks. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

One more thought about submenus done using DHTML...how compliant with
section 508 can they be made to be, and even if compliant, how easy can
they be for users interacting via assistive technologies?

Thanks!
- Doug
__________________________
CGI-AMS, Inc.
Douglas Brashear
Senior Consultant
12601 Fairlakes Circle
Fairfax, VA  22033
703-633-9839 (office)
703-863-0549 (mobile)
douglas.brashear at cgi-ams.com
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