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Re: Keyboard navigation using arrows only

for

From: Michael Tangen
Date: Sep 3, 2014 3:04PM

+1 Mallory

A lot of us web developers are *trying hard* to be compliant, but let's be
honest — those documenting ARIA standards for web developers are not doing
us any favors, those of us who don't work with system properties and
operating system level environments. Most web developers work with HTML
and Javascript, or perhaps CSS — we're largely familiar with those sorts of
things.

I realize this is a sidebar to the actual context of this thread, but those
responsible for ARIA documentation really need to address how they
communicate standards to those that don't work on the operating system
level (or understand it's deep level of complexity), but rather work on
things like DOM structure of HTML, Javascript events, and CSS properties.
If those documenting ARIA standards could translate those standards for
web professionals in terminology and contexts we understand and work with,
then I think we'd be a lot further along in building menus that were much
more accessible.


On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:16 PM, Mallory van Achterberg <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> 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
> > > >