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Re: Inaccessible mega menu and WCAG2

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From: Birkir R. Gunnarsson
Date: Jan 18, 2015 12:26PM

Andrew
My understanding was that the menu does not appear on keyboard focus
even when the keyboard focus moves into it, and that the user keeps
tabbing into it without seeing where he is tabbing. In that case the
keyboard only user is not able to activate any of the items in the
submenu without randomly hitting enter at some point and seeing what
happens.
In that case I would have a hard time saying the page is operable by
the keyboard .. this is similar to having a bunch of links with a CSS
background image and no accessible name (though of course it would be
called under a different success criterion, i.e. 2.4.4 or 3.3.2
depending on the control type, link or button) .. i.e. user has no
idea what he is activating until he activates it.
If the user sees that he can activate the menu by pressing enter on
the triggering element, that is perfect.
If the menu appears automatically when the triggering element receives
focus .. well, assuming user has access to it, I think that is
acceptable .. better than user having no idea that there is a context
menu available , only he is not able to see it.
Of course it is always hard to say specifically unless we are talking
about a concrete example, there are so many subtleties involved that
we might be thinking of this differently.



On 1/18/15, Andrew Kirkpatrick < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Birkir,
> I disagree that the submenu needs to appear on focus when it appears on
> mouse hover. What is required under 2.1.1 is that all functionality is
> operable from the keyboard.
>
> The decision to not make the submenu appear on focus is deliberate and is
> designed to same keyboard users the trouble of needing to tab through many
> additional links. If a keyboard user wants to go into the menu this is easy
> to do, but they don't need to tab through all submenu items or close each
> submenu after it opens on tab, only to tab again and have another submenu
> open that needs to be closed to progress.
>
> AWK
>
>