WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Trying to find middle ground with a developer

for

From: Sarah Ferguson
Date: Aug 7, 2017 1:44PM

Hi all,

We have an outside developer working on one of our sites. I've done a
review of the site and she's done a few rounds of fixes. We have a couple
of sticking points.

**Hamburger menu**

The desktop site has a hamburger menu. VoiceOver is reading the menu
as "*Navigation
3 items*." The open menu actually has 3 columns with 28 items total. You
cannot currently navigate column to column, nor are the columns ever
differentiated by Voiceover. It's read as one long list. To me, the user
hears 3 items and expects 3 items. Getting 28 items at this point is
confusing. Furthermore, I feel that someone having to backup through 28
items to close a menu with the toggle that opened it, is asking a lot.

I would be happy if it either announced 28 items and there was a way to
close the menu without backing all the way up, or if the user could
navigate column to column and drill into each column (at which point I feel
VO should also read the correct number of items in each column). I've given
her another of our sites that reads the actual number of items. It is also
much shorter than 28 items, so closing the menu is less of an issue. She
says that the code in that site is incorrect, so she won't follow it.

The main navigation has a similar issue. It is reading as 1 item (being 1
list with several items).

*Do you think it is ok to have the navigation menus read the number of
lists instead of the number of items? Any ideas for alternate solutions or
examples of sites you feel handle hamburger menu very well?*

****

**Image and caption**

The second issue is the way she coded images with captions. Right now, she
has coded the image and caption as a figure in HTML5. This is causing the
"figure" (the image and caption together) to read the alt text, followed by
hearing the alt text again for the image itself and then hearing the
caption. I find this redundant. She argues it is better, because this
tagging method identifies the caption as a caption and not just text. It
links the image and caption together. I can see that point, but the
redundancy still bothers me.

*What are your thoughts? Do you know of any alternate solutions for making
the caption and image be linked and label the caption as such, without the
alt text reading twice?*

****

Thanks!
Sarah





Sarah