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Re: accessibility of this drop down menu

for

From: Egan, Bim
Date: May 6, 2010 5:09AM

Hi Geof
The problem with dropdown menus like the one in the example that Angela
sent is that unless you can use a mouse, you can't reach any of the
links apart from those at the top level. Unfortunately the solution
that many web authors have used is a dropdown list that is completely
keyboard navigable, but impossible to bypass, (the worst I've seen had
160+ links in the navigation. That's 161 depressions of the tab key
before you get to the main content, and that's on every page you visit.


One solution is to use a menu according to the WAI-ARIA Authoring
Practices 1.0 patterns, as suggested by claudia, but if your authoring
skills aren't up to that, the low tech alternative is to ensure that the
top level links lead to section main pages that contain the subordinate
links.

Bim