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Re: Dropdown Menus

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From: Terzian, Sharon
Date: Jan 9, 2018 7:57AM

Thank you for bringing this up (again) I am totally interested in this as I've been wrestling with drop down menus forever!!!
And yet to find a solution for that

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of JP Jamous
Sent: Sunday, January 07, 2018 8:05 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Dropdown Menus

Hi WebAimers,



I have been researching dropdown menus on the web, but I wanted to find out what you folks have to share. Here is my situation below.



I have a nested dropdown menu on a client's web site. It is made up of a button that drops a list of menus onmouseover. The menus and their submenus stay visible for mouse users, as it works great for them. However, it is terrifying to screen reader and keyboard only users, because it has an array of nested links totaling about 50 links.



I figured that if I add onfocus to the menu button, the browser would detect a keyboard command and I can dropdown only the first level of menus. If the keyboard user chooses to expand or collapse the first level, that will be at the user's discretion.



What I am lacking is a tested JavaScript function or functions that use ARIA attributes to expand and collapse those menus. The menus are made up of unordered lists with links in each list. The developers would like to keep this template and not choose anything else as it will require so much work to redo this huge dropdown menu. I believe it is referred to as Mega menu.
Please, correct me if I am wrong.



Does anyone know of a good sample, snippet or documentation I can use? I want to break it down to the developers and explain to them how to add it to their already created menu. I have not been able to find something useful on the web so far and I unfortunately don't have the time to recreate the wheels.



Any help or explanations will be highly appreciated.