Medical education

Research and development

First time visit: View without clicking anything

Events at the Trust

Welcome to the website of Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust

St Andrew's Centre for Plastic Surgery and Burns

Cancer services

Anchor ambition

Research and innovation at our mid and south Essex hospitals

Lists of related items should be written [semantically](https://html.com/semantic-markup/) as a 
list.

Usually this means rewriting these to use the `<ul>` or `<ol>` tags.

This allows assistive technologies to more easily navigate from item to
item, or past entire groups of links if the user wants to. 

## Examples 

### Navigation

This navigation:

```html
<a href="/about">About us</a>
<a href="/products">Products</a>
<a href="/contact">Contact us</a>
```

Should be rewritten as a list:

```html
<ul>
  <li><a href="/about">About us</a></li>
  <li><a href="/products">Products</a></li>
  <li><a href="/contact">Contact us</a></li>
</ul>
```

### Tables for content

This single-column table is redundant. There is no
value in placing the content in a table, which makes
it harder for screen reader users to interpret and interact
with.

```html
<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Banana
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Apple
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Pear
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>
```

Should be rewritten as a list:

```html
<ul>
  <li>Banana</li>
  <li>Apple</li>
  <li>Pear</li>
</ul>
```

## Justification

Users of assistive technologies, like screen readers, can skip an entire
list in one step. In some cases, they can even search inside a list. 

These aids are not available where links are written outside a list. 
Failing to use lists correctly can force users to have to step through
hundreds of items one at a time.

## Methodology

1. Any single-column tables are automatically considered 
   redundant lists. 
2. For non-table elements, recursively work down the page looking inside
   each element for links separated by minimal amounts of non-link text. 
   If the non-link text is below 30 characters 
   in length, we assume we're inside content that should be a list.
   Some exceptions are made, e.g. the presence of an `<hr>` would break
   out of the list.

## More information

See [Technique
H48](https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20161007/H48) for
details.

mark-navigation-section-as-list

September 2025

August 2025

Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust

Title / URL	Issues
Medical educationwww.mse.nhs.uk/medical-education	2
Research and developmentwww.mse.nhs.uk/research-and-development	2
First time visit: View without clicking anythingwww.mse.nhs.uk/	2
Events at the Trustwww.mse.nhs.uk/events-at-the-trust	2
Welcome to the website of Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trustwww.mse.nhs.uk/	2
Welcome to the website of Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trustwww.mse.nhs.uk/home	2
St Andrew's Centre for Plastic Surgery and Burnswww.mse.nhs.uk/plastic-surgery-and-burns	2
Cancer serviceswww.mse.nhs.uk/mse-cancer-services	2
Anchor ambitionwww.mse.nhs.uk/anchor-ambition	1
Research and innovation at our mid and south Essex hospitalswww.mse.nhs.uk/research-innovation	1

Write lists or groups of links semantically

Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust

Where this issue has occurred