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Re: accessibility of this drop down menu

for

From: ckrugman
Date: May 6, 2010 8:21AM

This problem is address when using JAWS when in the drop down menu by
pressing the first letter of the word for the link in question taking the
user to those links that are presented alphabetically or alphanumerically.
What is more of an issue on some sights is when clicking on an item in the
drop down menu the click on the item immediately causes the new web page to
open as the item is immediately selected preventing the user from reading
through the choices.
Chuck
----- Original Message -----
From: "Egan, Bim" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Thursday, May 06, 2010 3:11 AM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] accessibility of this drop down menu


> 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
>
>