[Sigia-l] accessible navigation (was Right Side Navigation)

[Samantha Bailey]

I asked about this at work today, because I wasn't sure. Apparently, they
opted to move the nav to the bottom and used "skip *to* nav" as the anchor
point. The decision was based on observation in testing and the theory that
more users would benefit from having the content immediately and the nav
secondarily. That said, it hasn't proven a perfect answer--one of the
usability engineers who worked on the project told me that our blind users
tended to "wander into that section by mistake and couldn't make much sense
of it or escape from it."

If you have an opportunity to do usability testing with blind/low vision
users, I highly recommend it. When we started we had a site that followed
all the accessibility guidelines to a "t"--so it was *technically*
accessible, yet our blind users had a miserable time with it. We've been
able to improve it, but there is still quite a way to go.

sb



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tanya Rabourn" <tanya at pixelcharmer.com>
To: "SIGIA-L" <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 2004 11:17 PM
Subject: [Sigia-l] accessible navigation (was Right Side Navigation)


> On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Samantha Bailey wrote:
> > This doesn't advance the right side nav debate, but I thought I'd share
an
> > experience we've had with usability testing and accessibility. One of
the
> > issues we've had with blind users in usability tests and our left
navigation
> > is that blind users have grown frustrated having to listen to the full
left
> > nav repeated on every page.
>
> Have you tried using "skip nav" as an anchor point link to
> wisk them past it (whether hidden from visual browsers with
> CSS or not[1])? At one point this seemed to be the going
> wisdom for dealing with that problem. Did you find that had
> a downside?
>
> -Tanya
>
> 1)http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ScreenreaderVisibility
>
>
>
>
>
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