This is part two of a series of three blogs on accessible website navigation:

• The first covers various menus.
• The second (this one) covers: site maps, links and hot spots.
• The final covers: search, skip-tos and access keys.

I will look at each technique in turn and consider how they can be used to enhance the accessibility of a site and when they can make things worse.

Site map

This is a page that has a structured list of the menus, sub-menus and sub-sub-menus on the site. Hopefully it is generated automatically by the website development tool otherwise it is likely to be out of date.

Site-maps provide a good way of getting an overview of a site just like looking at the table of contents of a report.

They tend to be represented as lists and sub-lists. Screen-readers should be able to jump from item and ignore sub-items. What would be really nice is a version that can be expanded and contracted like an operating system directory list but so far I have not seen such a sophisticated implementation.

Links

Clicking on a link will navigate the user to another part of the same page, another page on the site, or somewhere else. There are standards regarding the implementation of links.

Firstly there must be a description of the link and where it links to, otherwise a screen-reader user tabbing from link to link will just hear "link, link, link..." and have no idea what the function of the link is.

Secondly there is the issue of the linked page opening in a new window. This can be very confusing for the user as the previous page button on the linked-to page does not take them back to the original page. I find this confusing at times (if I have not seen a visual clue that it has happened) but it is a real pain for a blind user. If it is essential to use this function the user must be told that it is going to happen. Best practice suggests that the linked-to page should always open in the same window/tab. Modern browsers provide a function to the user to optionally open any link in a new window/tab so I would strongly recommend that the decision is left to the user.

Finally, the number of links should be limited, so that the user does not have to tab too many times; around ten is fine, but I have seen pages with 50+ which are unusable. If a page has lots of links in the content then it should be redesigned and divided into a hierarchy of pages.

Hot Spots

Hot spots are like links but instead of being related to a piece of text they are connected to some non-textual information such as an area on a map. The issues relating to links also apply to hot spots. The other issue is how a non-pointing device user navigates to the hot-spot. Some method of listing the hot spots is required.

The final part of this blog is here.