Getting started with practical web accessibility, section 2 Demonstration: an analysis of a page:

Rule 9: Linearizability

If we test the page using the Yellowpipe Lynx viewer, we get a rendering that starts as follows:

Language options

   [1]Arabic [2]Chinese English [3]French [4]Russian [5]Spanish 
   [6]WHO home 
   ____________________ Search
   (_) All WHO (_) This site only

   [7]Home
   [8]About WHO
   [9]Countries
   [10]Health topics
   [11]Publications
   [12]Research tools
   [13]WHO sites
   [14]Food Safety
   [15]Zoonoses
   [16]Microbiological risks
   [17]Chemical risks
   [18]Biotechnology (GM foods)
   [19]Food standards (Codex Alimentarius)
   [20]Foodborne disease
   [21]Food production to consumption
   [22]Capacity building
   [23]Consumer education
     Food safety
     [24]About | [25]Contact us | [26]Publications | [27]Related links
     [28]WHO > [29]WHO sites > [30]Food safety > [31]Publications related
   to food safety > [32]Chemical risks publications
   [33]printable version

   Frequently asked questions - acrylamide in food

The numbers in brackets indicate links. Note that the links appear as a more chaotic collection than in the graphic rendering, since the visual formatting is lost.

We have reproduced the lengthy start to illustrate what many people have to go through every time they access a page of this site. When using a speech browser, they need to listen to this over and over again, unless there is some tool for skipping it.

Thus, there is a lot of repetitive content (navigation shared by other pages of the site) before the content proper, and no link for skipping it. This would be easy to fix by adding a skip navigation link. It should skip to the text “Frequently asked questions…” (or a reformulation of it).

The order inside the form is not quite optimal. When you use the tab key, you first enter the text input field, then the submit button, then the radio buttons. Therefore, if you wish to affect the search mode, you need to move to the radio buttons past the submit button, then backwards. This is mostly just a minor inconvenience, but it could be avoided by using a different form design.

In other respects, the page linearizes well. (It actually uses fairly complicated layout tables, but they do not affect the linearized browsing experience.)