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Re: ARIA for main navigation bar

for

From: Judith.A.Blankman
Date: Apr 23, 2015 4:54PM

These are great points.

My next questionÅ 

It is my understanding that "aria-selected" can only be applied to menu
items and not list items. So do you recommend simply using hidden text to
communicate a selected or "you are here" state? (Standards pain point, but
I gotta make what we have today work.)

This menu is definitely not a tree, which I know "aria-selected" can also
be used for.

Best,

Judith




On 4/23/15 3:27 PM, "Patrick H. Lauke" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>On 23/04/2015 22:52, Jennifer Sutton wrote:
>[...]
>> I tend to think that a flyout menu, such as the tutorial describes, more
>> typically represents what would be needed on a Web site; whereas, using
>> the ARIA menubar would be more for a Web *application*. I guess the
>> simplest way I can put it is that even if something looks like a
>> menubar, is it really *acting* like one?
>>
>> One of the things that I find with ARIA (and perhaps it's with the
>> mis-application of it) is that one can spend a lot of time going in and
>> out of application mode to make selections (with JFW, for example).
>> There are absolutely cases where this is necessary, but I am not
>> convinced that menus are necessarily one of them, except when the
>> Web-based product is working like software.
>[...]
>> My last point would be that when I'm navigating a menu, I want to get
>> where I'm going (and figure that out) as quickly as possible, and I find
>> that over-ARIA-fication can slow me down.
>
>I'd echo Jennifer's comments here. I've also found (speaking to a few
>other AT users, and from my own experience in development/testing) that
>overly complex ARIA patterns are sometimes overkill (and the more
>complex they are, the less likely they seem to be to work on anything
>other than desktop machines with a keyboard, as many of the patterns
>rely on custom keyboard event handling - on mobile devices, it seems
>that it's up to the AT/browser to work out appropriate gestures/controls
>purely from the assigned roles/attributes, meaning that any slight
>deviation from a particular complex pattern can result in completely
>unusable / unsupported constructs).
>
>In fact, I'm currently considering pulling some of the (well meaning,
>but not always helpful/appropriate) ARIA-fied things from the next
>version of Bootstrap (for instance, the current pattern used for
>menus/dropdowns, which attempts to follow the more application-centric
>approach, while most authors seem to be using them primarily as
>navigation tools).
>
>P
>--
>Patrick H. Lauke
>
>www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke
>http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
>twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke
>>>>