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Re: Trying to find middle ground with a developer

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From: Ben Regis
Date: Aug 8, 2017 5:32AM


Hi Sarah

Is it possible to see the website?

Kind regards

Ben

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Sarah Ferguson
Sent: 07 August 2017 20:44
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Trying to find middle ground with a developer

Hi all,

We have an outside developer working on one of our sites. I've done a review of the site and she's done a few rounds of fixes. We have a couple of sticking points.

**Hamburger menu**

The desktop site has a hamburger menu. VoiceOver is reading the menu as "*Navigation
3 items*." The open menu actually has 3 columns with 28 items total. You cannot currently navigate column to column, nor are the columns ever differentiated by Voiceover. It's read as one long list. To me, the user hears 3 items and expects 3 items. Getting 28 items at this point is confusing. Furthermore, I feel that someone having to backup through 28 items to close a menu with the toggle that opened it, is asking a lot.

I would be happy if it either announced 28 items and there was a way to close the menu without backing all the way up, or if the user could navigate column to column and drill into each column (at which point I feel VO should also read the correct number of items in each column). I've given her another of our sites that reads the actual number of items. It is also much shorter than 28 items, so closing the menu is less of an issue. She says that the code in that site is incorrect, so she won't follow it.

The main navigation has a similar issue. It is reading as 1 item (being 1 list with several items).

*Do you think it is ok to have the navigation menus read the number of lists instead of the number of items? Any ideas for alternate solutions or examples of sites you feel handle hamburger menu very well?*

****

**Image and caption**

The second issue is the way she coded images with captions. Right now, she has coded the image and caption as a figure in HTML5. This is causing the "figure" (the image and caption together) to read the alt text, followed by hearing the alt text again for the image itself and then hearing the caption. I find this redundant. She argues it is better, because this tagging method identifies the caption as a caption and not just text. It links the image and caption together. I can see that point, but the redundancy still bothers me.

*What are your thoughts? Do you know of any alternate solutions for making the caption and image be linked and label the caption as such, without the alt text reading twice?*

****

Thanks!
Sarah





Sarah