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Re: Improving the Accessibility of My Projects

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From: glen walker
Date: Jan 8, 2020 5:17PM

As a keyboard user, I prefer my top-level menus to *not* automatically open
just because I tabbed to them. Your "Parent Page" menu opens and shows
"sub-page" just by receiving focus. It's not a WCAG violation. It's more
of a personal preference to me as a keyboard user. It lets me tab across
the main menu and get to the search field fairly quickly. If the top level
menu will have a lot of items in it (although hopefully that number is kept
somewhat small), then as Carly said, you could have a "skip to search"
after "skip to main".

In general, I prefer the DOM tabbing order. It's predictable and easy to
implement - you don't have to do anything :-)

If you want to force a certain tab order, it can get complicated and messy
very fast. I would not use tabindex. You can still use the DOM order but
use CSS to move elements around, but be careful with this too. So your
search form could be first in the DOM but you position on the right and
down a bit from the top (so it's "under" your menu), then have the menu
next in the DOM. That gives you the tab order you want and the visual
order you want. There is a bit of a disconnect from the tabbing order that
most people will expect from seeing the layout, but it's not a WCAG
violation.

I don't see any problem with how it works now. Menu first then search
field.