WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessible accordion menus

for

From: Al Sparber
Date: Mar 9, 2009 11:20AM

From: "Angela French" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >

> It just so happens that I'm working on one myself that would be nice if a
> JAWS user could test it. I would ge grateful if you would. Here is the
> complete html test file.

Hi Angela,

In a completely default installation of Jaws 10, after "clicking" your image
links, Jaws stops working. Silence. In order to access the sub-menu items I
must then press my down arrow key to "hunt" for the list inside. It is,
however, accessible in that manner.

Our quest was a bit different in that we wanted our visually hidden
accordion content accessible to a brand new Jaws user. That is, we wanted
Jaws to begin reading the page and to read our hidden content contiguously,
without interruption.

Seth's proposal does not work well for a menu but does work for an
accordion - which this thread does not quite have correctly defined. My
original test page is an accordion. Accordions can contain menus but more
often contain mixed content. Your page has drop-down menus.

Menus are a completely different animal in terms of accessibility and
drop-down menus, in my opinion, should be seen and not heard - especially
within the scope of Seth's past posts.

Your menu, however, since it is relatively small in scope could be better
deployed thusly:

Have your triggers be headings.
Use background images over real text.
Position the menu lists off-screen.
Assign your onclicks assigned programmatically instead of being on the tags
Place a skip-nav link above the first heading.

Perfect now :-)

--
Al Sparber - PVII
http://www.projectseven.com