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Re: Keyboard navigation using arrows only

for

From: Michael Tangen
Date: Sep 3, 2014 10:35PM

I did read through that document, along with a variety of others like
Terril Thompson's blog and WebAIM. It was modestly helpful, but when it
came to gleaning information from it to the specific context of a
deeply-nested UL-based menu (one typical of a government entity), it wasn't
nearly as helpful. The horizontal and vertical examples were not
applicable — we don't typically see a single button clicked to engage a
large menu, but rather an opening UL list of several items, each with their
own deep list of descendants, up to five or six levels deep. Mega-menus,
generally-speaking, do not work well for government agencies or
organizations with vast amounts of information that cannot be organized
into two or three levels of navigation.

What web developers are looking for is pretty simple (and I know this from
my discussions with colleagues and reading other developer blogs frustrated
by the lack of cohesive and concise information on the subject). They want
to know what the required mark-up is for their nested UL lists — what goes
in the first <navigation> and <ul> tags, what goes in those first level of
<li> and <a> tags, and what goes in the descendant <ul> <li> and <a> tags.
They also want to know what are the proper CSS attributes to use in their
stylesheet when hiding and displaying the children of a menu item.
Everything else (within that context of developing accessible navigation)
is just noise.

One other thing about the examples (your horizontal and vertical menus),
there is a lot of ARIA-related controls and attributes that aren't
necessary when a menu is contained within the DOM's structure like
aria-owns, aria-posinset, aria-setsize. The example uses hidden divs out
of the context of the navigation (hence the extra controls and attributes,
I know). But most navigation these days, as someone pointed out earlier is
either deep UL trees or the so-called "mega-menu."

If those that develop some of the ARIA documentation for web developers
would like another pair of eyes to read for "developer accessibility" (in
terms of understanding the documentation....which I do believe is yet
another aspect of WCAG 2.0 guidelines), I'd be happy to try and help if
I've got some time.





On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 6:07 PM, Bryan Garaventa <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> I understand your points, and those documenting the standards are aware of
> and do understand this problem as well, which isn't helped by the
> proliferation of outdated, half-correct, and incorrect data distributed
> across the web regarding ARIA that is publically accessible for all
> developers.
>
> If I may ask, did reading the training guide at
> http://whatsock.com/training/
> help at all? A little bit?
>
> This was written to educate standard developers with a background in HTML
> and JavaScript with little to no knowledge of ARIA, for the purpose of
> breaking down these concepts into sensible primary topics in order to make
> learning how ARIA works, and how it can be used properly, easier for those
> developers unfamiliar with ARIA that make up the majority worldwide.
>
> In order to ensure the highest level of accuracy possible, and so as not
> to add to the prolific amount of bad ARIA advice globally, this was a
> collaborative effort with W3C PFWG members in order to ensure that this
> would be true before it was released publically.
>
> Since I'm still in the process of fine-tuning the details, please let me
> know where anything is unclear and I'll be happy to clarify and expound the
> sections where this occurs.
>
> Best wishes,
> Bryan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto:
> <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Michael Tangen
> Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2014 2:04 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Keyboard navigation using arrows only
>
> +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
> > > > > > list messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
> >
> > > messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>
>
> > > >