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Re: Building a New Dropdown for Mobile

for

From: David Ashleydale
Date: May 21, 2013 6:40PM

Cool. Are those generally accepted as being accessible?

On Tuesday, May 21, 2013, Paul Adam wrote:

> http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.2.1/docs/forms/selects/custom.html
>
> Try jQuery mobile Custom select menus
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On May 21, 2013, at 6:49 PM, David Ashleydale < <EMAIL REMOVED> <javascript:;>>
> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to collect some information to give to one of our design teams
> to discourage them from building their own dropdown / picker functionality
> from scratch. They don't want to use the default <select> functionality
> because they don't like how it looks on an iPhone. They don't like how
> dropdowns get implemented as wheel picker thingies.
>
> They want to create a form control or something that a user can click on,
> then display the list of items in a layer. These would be implemented as
> links and they would use JavaScript to allow users to click on an item,
> close the layer, and then display their choice. Basically, they are
> recreating the <select> functionality, just making it look "better".
>
> I let them know that screen reading software like VoiceOver recognizes the
> <select> code and informs the user that it is a "picker" and it further
> explains how to interact with it. That is built in to VoiceOver. If we
> build something new, VoiceOver won't recognize it as a dropdown. It will
> present it as a link that opens an overlay that contains a list of links.
> It's not semantically the same as a dropdown / picker.
>
> The team then asked me if we can add hidden text to this new widget that
> explains to users how to interact with it. I said yes, but we would have to
> do extensive testing to ensure that this experience ends up logical and
> intuitive. The nice thing about <select> is that none of that testing and
> research needs to be done.
>
> Are there other considerations that you can think of that would discourage
> going down the path of developing existing functionality like this from
> scratch? Or am I being fussy? :)
>
> Thanks,
> David
> > > > > > >