Sent by Rich Caloggero on 15 August 2002 18:06
[Please CC [EMAIL-REMOVED] when responding to this message. THANX!]
One of the most annoying problems with web pages for a blind user is that,
in order to find the main content on many pages, especially news papers or
other high-volume information sites, she must wade through a sea of mostly
useless navigation links, ads, and other garbage. This generally happens on
every page of the site in question. It often takes a couple of minutes on a
typical news site to actually find the text of the article your interested
in. This is 2 minutes from the time the page containing the article is
actually loaded in the browser. Just imagine having to listen to all the
garbage on each CNN page in order to find the 10 lines of text which
constitute the content of the article whose title you just clicked on. How
often would you visit the site?
What I propose is to create separate divs for the content and the navigation
sections. then, using style sheets, position these where they should go. The
trick here is to place the navigation div *after* the div containing the
main content in the html container. So, you'd have:
<html>
<head>
... ... ...
<style>
.navigation { // position it at the top or side, wherever
}
.content { // position this where you like
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="content">
This is the main content of the page. Since it is the first element in the
body, the screen reader will read it first. However, since style sheets are
used for positioning, it can appear on the screen wherever you like.
</div>
<div class="footer">
Since this appears *after* the main content, the screen reader reads it
next. Again, you can position this anywhere you like.
</div>
<div class="navigation">
<!-- Navigation Links get read last by screen reader -->
<a href="#">Home Page</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Making this work cross-browser may be difficult. What do you think? Does it
make sense in general? Is the CSS positioning well-enough implemented to
make this a workable general technique?
Rich Caloggero
MIT Adaptive Tech. for Info. and Computing
