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Re: Accessible drop-down menus

for

From: Moore,Michael
Date: Jun 12, 2009 7:50AM

Peter Wiel wrote

"I wonder whether someone could comment on the dropdown menus used on
the University of Colorado site (the home page menus differ a bit from
the secondary level pages. Some colleagues have cited these as a
possible model for us, mentioning how the home page menus are "content
rich" (meaning the graphics, I guess). I'm not sure I care for the
comma-separated lists of links on the home page menus, but are there
other obvious accessibility or usability problems that others can spot?"



Keyboard only navigation (without a screen reader) is rather difficult. You can get to all the links but the only destination feedback that you receive is the url in the status bar. The very large number of tab stops (links and form fields) 175, plus the limited support for moving to different sections of the page, search is stop 64, could make this site very challenging for someone with a physical impairment that restricted them to keyboard navigation.

Mike Moore


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Peter Weil
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2009 10:15 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Accessible drop-down menus

On Jun 10, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Al Sparber wrote:

>
> Use a JavaScript-based menu. There are several out there. It's
> usually best
> to stay away from drop downs that are operated purely with CSS. If you
> search this list's archive for your subject you should come up with
> several
> lengthy discussions.
>

I wonder whether someone could comment on the dropdown menus used on
the University of Colorado site (the home page menus differ a bit from
the secondary level pages. Some colleagues have cited these as a
possible model for us, mentioning how the home page menus are "content
rich" (meaning the graphics, I guess). I'm not sure I care for the
comma-separated lists of links on the home page menus, but are there
other obvious accessibility or usability problems that others can spot?

http://colorado.edu/

--
Peter Weil, Web Developer
University Communications
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Phone: 608-262-6538
Email: <EMAIL REMOVED>