Del.icio.us and JAWS

Today I thought I'd try out that nifty little social bookmarking site known as Del.icio.us with JAWS. I was more pleasantly surprised than irked for a change! I have to say I'm learning a lot about navigating the web without sight and it's helping my JAWS knowledge as well. Whoever would have thought I'd be able to spend so much time using Web 2.0 at work and it be relevant!



OK, some things about Del.icio.us:

1. Navigation - not bad! Not heavy on graphics and quite linear so JAWS read through lists quite happily. I managed to get to the login page and login and read my pathetic three links. Only niggle is the vertical bar which separates the navigation links at the top and occassionally elsewhere on the page- aggggghhhhhh!!!! It reads out as "vertical bar" and is quite annoying!


2. Missing heading number 2 - when I went through the headings list, there seems to be no mention of heading level 2. Heading level 1 and heading level 3 and 4 are all present and correct, but not heading level 2. Seems that they have not considered that they could change the size of the headings so that they could use the heading levels correctly.
3. They do have alt text for the images, but this then unfortunately means that there are a lot of repeated links when JAWS is just running through the page for the first time.

In general I thought it worked OK with JAWS. Nothing is ever going to be perfect and it's certainly easier to navigate around than Facebook and there is not the heavy reliance on tables as others. The real niggle is that vertical bar - is it really necessary? Would anyone notice if it went missing?