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Re: mouseover/hover and keyboard accessible expandablemenu?

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From: deblist@suberic.net
Date: Nov 6, 2009 11:20AM

On Fri, 6 Nov 2009, Jared Smith wrote:
> Agreed, but it often does not work this way with web accessibility. A
> web developer must make decisions and those decisions are usually
> forced upon the site visitors.

That's not true, though. I interact with any given webpage in
many different ways. For example, there are a few webpages were
in order to get to certain items embedded in the menus I toggle
off CSS, because the various drop-down are badly written and the
only way I can find things is by hiding the CSS. On the other
hand, at other times I leave the CSS turned on because of the
extra usability of having the page layout look right. Sometimes I
turn off JavaScript because it makes too much on the page active
and I lose control, and other times I turn JavaScript back on
because it's the only way I have navigation. Sometimes I turn off
images because I want to know the name of the alt text so that I
can keyboard navigate to it via direct access, or because it's
the only way I can get the extra punchline on an xkcd cartoon
without mouse access. As a web navigator with disabilities, I
make these choices *all the time*.

In the same way, JAWS users can decide to browse the entire page,
to look for headings, to look for landmarks if they are there, to
report alt text or not, to report the title attribute on links or
ignore it, etc.

Users with disabilities are not helpless pawns being led by the
hand through webpages by the kind developers who worry about
accessibility. We have agency, and we use it. So more tools gives
us more opportunity to use our agency.

> I am curious though, how you typically interact with such menus using
> only your keyboard. Have you found them to generally be accessible? If
> so, how do they work? Any examples of good ones? Have you found a
> universal convention to making them keyboard accessible? Do you think
> they could be made accessible to someone that cannot see them?

I've had mixed success. My greatest success with such menus is
using Firefox + mouseless browsing. SOME (but certainly not all)
JavaScript enabled drop-down menus can be directly dropped down
via a link if you access them via mouseless browsing. I have
encountered very few menus that could be accessed directly via
the keyboard in Firefox or Opera, by which I mean tabbing to them
and then hitting enter or somesuch, although they do exist.

Right now I'm working on improving the menus of the site I'm
working on, and I keep going through multiple rounds of testing,
because not only am I testing myself with JAWS, NVDA, etc., but I
have a fairly respectably sized community of screenreader users
with a variety of different ways of working with computers who
are also testing for me. So yes, I do think they can be made
accessible to someone who cannot see them, because I've got work
in progress which is improving all the time. WAI-ARIA helps, of
course, that isn't available to everybody.

-deborah