Header Example
While in Austin, TX, this year (2008) I went to the Knowbility booth on the SXSW trade show floor and sat down to have one of their blind volunteers go over my work website. We sat and talked for a bit and then she had me put on a set of double earphones so we both could listen/read the website.
She first went a around the home page to see what was there and to make any suggestions for improvement. She did not really find any, since I had done the smae thing last year a woman named Patrica Pound, who was another blind volunteer from Knowbility.
I asked her to go to the “A - Z Index” page and find a certain link. To do this she started going through my headers to help narrow down her search. At one point she asked why it kept reading a letter and an internal link of “TOP”. I told her it was meant to be a link back to the to of the page, so people did not have to scroll back up a very long list if you decided to look for something else.
This got me thinking that maybe I should change the wording for these headers for blind users. To do this I used the same technique that you would use to hide the “Skip Navigation” off screen, to then hide more information about the headers that display the index letter and the “TOP” links from the visual page.
Instead of just reading “A - TOP” it now reads “A - Lettered Items - Return to top of main content ”, which I'm hoping makes it easier to understand for those using screen readers.
List of Washington, DC. Libraries
The following “A - Z Index” list contains all the current libraries in the Washington, DC system, with links to their information pages.