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Re: drop down menus

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jul 30, 2003 11:42PM

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, NutHouse Studios wrote:

> I was wondering if it's possible to make drop down menus for navigation that
> are accessible?

Depends on what you mean by accessibility, but the practical answer is
"no, and there's no need to". Dropdown menus for navigation are a bad idea
and cause serious usability problems. There's little need to consider
accessibility issues when we know that it's a wrong approach anyway.
Besides, designers who use drop down navigation menus on their pages
will hardly take the considerable extra work needed to remove some of
their accessibility problems.

For a detailed discussion of the drawbacks of navigational drop down
menus, as well as an advice on fixing some of the worst problem if you
have been forced to use them, please check
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/navmenu.html

> For an example of what I'd like to do, see:
> http://www.wcc.cc.il.us/

Bad usability and lack of accessibility everywhere.

> I know that they're not using ALT tags,

Symptomatic, isn't it? But adding ALT attributes (sic) would be like
painting a collapsed building.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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