Accessible Navigation

Navigation is usually at the top of a designer's list, but when it gets passed to the coder, it is often just dumped straight on to the page with little thought for text-browsers. As long as the menu is where the designer says it should be, that's ok, right?

Wrong. Going back to the Headers and Paragraphs argument, how does a search engine or text-browser know that this is the navigation for the page and not just a series of links? Well, it doesn't. All it will see is a set of linked words. Not only is this a nightmare to navigate, but it doesn't really get indexed with any priority.

An unordered list is a much more attractive way to build menus and sub-menus. Not only can you style them in any way you like to please the designer, but they are displayed in a more structured and balanced way to a text-browser or search engine. An added benefit is that these are very easy to manage in the back-end of a dynamically-driven site. Have a look at the Suckerfish menus. These give you ways to style fly-out menus based on unordered lists, and I use them extensively. If somebody can't see the CSS you've applied, the lists are displayed in a sensible, obvious and very readable fashion.