is this design 'accessible' ?

[Greg Schmidt]

For a site with a 7 link navbar I've recently concluded that there are 2
contradicting requirements.

For linear/1 dimensional access (screen readers/speaking browsers) of
the sub pages a single link back to the index page would be ideal,
thereby preventing the imo pointless reading out of the navbar links on
every sub page.

This doesn't apply to 2 dimensional (visual) access of the same
documents imo, users can effortlessly skip over the navbar, and it
facilitates quick "zapping" of a site's content.

This is one reason why the navigation should always appear after the
content in your HTML, and use CSS to reposition it to where you want it
on the screen. A closely related reason is that search engines will
then weight your content higher than your navigation, rather than the
other way around.

 

[Headless]

This is one reason why the navigation should always appear after the
content in your HTML, and use CSS to reposition it to where you want it
on the screen.

That's what I'm doing currently, but absolute positioning comes with
it's own set of problems, text zooming in Mozilla and text selection in
IE most notably.

A closely related reason is that search engines will
then weight your content higher than your navigation, rather than the
other way around.

Some silly SE's may display a short extract from the top of a page
instead of the section containing the search phrase (as Google does),
but I doubt that SE's weigh content according to where it appears in a
document.


Headless

 

[Toby A Inkster]

I doubt that SE's weigh content according to where it appears in a
document.

Lycos used to only index headings, links and the first few paragraphs of
text. I doubt they still do things this way though.