)
Figure 4-6. This navigation means nothing to the
visitor. While some vague meaning could be
gleaned, the menu is difficult to use without
explicit labels.
WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES
78
6. www.websitesthatsuck.com
Drop-down menus
Drop-downs present an interesting paradox of efficient navigation structure with substantial
accessibility challenges. They allow designers to construct a global navigation with links
to the primary buckets of content, while at the same time presenting a layer of local
navigation in an attempt to both offer a preview of the topics of the main section and
hopefully save the visitor a click from bypassing the sectional landing page. Like most
brilliant ideas, however, it is weighed down by a reality check. In this case, the elegance of
drop-downs is counterbalanced by significant inaccessibility on several fronts.
Older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer do not recognize key CSS attributes necessary
to create drop-downs in pure CSS, so the menus depend on JavaScript to function.7 As
with anything reliant on client-side scripting, the developer has to hope that JavaScript is
not disabled, otherwise the functionality is crippled.
Pages:
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195