WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Keyboard navigation using arrows only

for

From: Mallory van Achterberg
Date: Sep 3, 2014 2:16PM

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 11:29:52AM -0500, Michael Tangen wrote:
> I get your point, but the problem is that all of the documentation out
> there for creating accessible web menus is in itself both convoluted and
> inaccessible to the average web developer/designer. You know why there's a
> lot of "hacks" out there? This would be the reason.

I have to agree with this, and I feel I'm not too horrible at reading
"spec-ese". Tutorials and blogs with proven, correct implementations
are the only thing saving a lot of us at the moment, which is a bit
of a shame because with for example these menus (if one chooses the
convoluted-in-my-opinion menu roles instead of the traditional
unordered nested list) is that if you use the wrong roles, you can
easily totally break the whole menu.

And even when you get it right, a "typical" (non-developer) screen
reader user may still have no idea wtf this menu (or whatever widget)
is or how to use it (as evidenced by my co-tester on a website which
used a correct implementation of the menu-role setup for a mega-menu,
where she was quite confused as what the structure actually meant,
especially as NVDA (her normal reader) and JAWS15 (her testing reader)
both worked but acted slightly different).
...and yes, users have a responsibility to learn their software but
being both relatively "new" and often not so straight-forward means
there are a good number of users having trouble figuring out correct
implementations and hearing new things being announced.

_mallory