Accessible menus
By Carla Froitzheim (cf@cf-webservice.de) for the Content Rendering Group
One of the keys to accessible websites are the navigation menus. The navigation can lock you out from a website like a dog at the butcher´s or it can guide you comfortably through the website´s structure, indicating your current location and pointing to the topics that await you on the various pages. Websites with accessible menus allow you to navigate through the pages with graphical browsers as well as with text browsers, web readers, PDAs or other output devices.
If we want to build accessible menus the first thing we must do is say good-bye to menus using javascript as the only key to open the door to next navigation levels. If you want to keep these menus with fancy layer effects or other stunning features and still want to have an accessible website you have to build it twice, a script version for the graphical browsers with javascript enabled and a noscript version for disabled javascript and non-graphical browsers and output devices.
Next thing we should do is say good-bye to unstructured graphical menus. Although text browsers or web readers recognize an image link as link they can´t read the nice text on your button. You can just specify the target of your link by the title tag and the writing on the button by the alt tag. But even if you give all possible help and hints an unstructured graphical menu read by a text browser or web reader won´t reflect the hierarchical structure of your website. And this is an important matter if you have to find your way through navigation levels without any visual guidance. Especially if you have a complex structure with several branches and sub levels the best way to keep an overview is a hierarchical menu structure that clearly indicates in which branch and on which level you are or you are about to go.
