Finding your way:

Accessible Web Page Design:
How long should one page be?

The definitive answer is: that depends.

Hypertext allows the site-designer to present lots of different, but related, information in a non-linear format, using links to let the end-user follow interesting trails through the site. Information can be broken up into small, discrete chunks. Each page should contain a link to the site's home page, previous page, and a table of contents (if one is provided). A table of contents is a good idea, especially if your site is large and complex.

If you are publishing a narrative story, or a long text with a single topic then you might not want to break the flow with hypertext links outside the document. It might be appropriate to create a series of smaller documents broken at logical points, such as chapter or section endings. At the end of each section you would include a link to the next, previous, table of contents and/or home pages.

But the question remains: how long should any page be? If you are reading a site with a contemporary graphical browser and an MS-Windows aware screen reader, you would probably be very happy if all the content of one document fit on one screen page. Then you would not have to flip between review mode and command mode, using the page up and down keys to see subsequent lines of the current page. (None of the screen-readers we have tried so far will read the entire document that was brought into memory.)

On the other hand, the user wanting to download an entire document would be pretty annoyed to have to save many small chunks and reintegrate them later using a word processor. An option for the page designer would be to include a link to a file containing a complete plain-text (ASCII) version of the document. The end-user could easily download this file.

Finding your way.

Making Tables Accessible.
Are FORMS Accessible?