Navigation

I have questions about how to make a website with extensive
navigation as accessibility friendly as possible.

The specific site I have in mind is for a municipality.
Although Section 508 is  not mandated for us, we want to
make the site as accessible as possible.  This is a site I
did not design, but am now maintaining.

The navigation might not be extensive compared to other
sites, but I think you can see the concept that there are
several main sections to the site (down the left side of the
screen) and lots of subsections (down the right side of the
screen) within each section.

Here's an example:
http://www.montpelier-vt.org/htm/citydepts_welcome.shtml

How can we make the navigation as clear as possible and
still serve accessibility?

In talking things over with me, the person who first had
this site designed mused about the possibility of using
mouseovers or rollovers to see a submenu under each main
section heading.  In some ways it would make the page a
little neater and would make the navigation more clear, but
I think it would bring up accessibility issues.

Also, how much navigation does someone want to wade through
before finally getting to the meat of the page?

Another related navigation question deals with making a site
map page.  It would give an overview of the whole site and
where to find things, but it could be horrendous to have to
listen to an endless page of links.  It is nagging at me
that if the site navigation is done well enough, a site map
would be unnessary.  Any thoughts on this?

(I have been using pwWebSpeak to test how pages sound.  I
wonder if it is a close enough approximation of what most
screen reader users use.  I bought it several years ago.)

Any helpful suggestions will be appreciated.  Also, any
links to good examples would be nice, too.

Thank you.

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