Spartanicus <me@privacy.net> wrote in
news:ng********************************@news.spart anicus.utvinternet.ie:
Dave Patton <sp**@trap.invalid> wrote:
Using my About page as an example:
http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/about.html
What is the best/proper way to markup a page such as
this that has "the main body" and "a navigation menu"?
It has been suggested before that I should have the
navigation menu at the end of the HTML, so that a
screen reader doesn't have to read it to get to
the content
, with the possible exception of having
it at the top of the HTML for the site's homepage.
I see no reason why there should be an exception for the index page.
The reason I was asking was that on Jun 12th, in the thread
"Heading-related HTML issues" in this group, Jukka K. Korpela said
"except perhaps on the _main_ page. When entering a main page,
the user _might_ wish to hear the table of content first".
If you are going to use a site wide nav then every link from the nav
bar/section should also appear in the "content" section of the index
page along with text explaining what can be found there.
You mean like I have on my site's index page?
http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/index.html It has also been suggested that there should be a link
at the start of the HTML to skip to the navigation menu,
and that this link should be hidden using CSS.
Bad form imo.
June 10th, in the "Heading-related HTML issues" thread,
Lachlan Hunt said "You can either put the site navigation
at the top or bottom. Either way, be sure to include a
skip link to either skip to content or skip to navigation,
depending whether it's at the top or bottom. You can hide
this skip link with CSS, but it's visible when the document
is not styled".
July 9th, in the "Site review request: www.elac.bc.ca" thread
in this group, "jake" said:
For benefit of assistive technology (AT) users:
Consider:
(a) Position the 'On this page' portion of the menu so that it gets
read at the *start* of the page -- not at the end. i.e. So it acts
as a Table of Contents.
(b) Provide a 'skip to navigation' link at the start of each page so
that a user can get quickly to the 'At this site' portion of the menu.
In other words, I've seen contradictory suggestions for
'the best way to do things', some of it from 'well known'
people in these newsgroups, so that's why I was asking :-)
Thanks to you and brucie for the feedback.
--
Dave Patton
Canadian Coordinator, Degree Confluence Project
http://www.confluence.org/
My website:
http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/