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Re: (The return of...) Accessible popup menus

for

From: Al Sparber
Date: Aug 9, 2005 11:08AM

From: "Austin, Darrel" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "'WebAIM Discussion List'" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2005 5:26 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] (The return of...) Accessible popup menus


> Coincidently, after last weeks debate on DHTML fly-out navigation,
> I'm now
> at the point where I need to consider it for use on a couple of our
> sites.
>
> I'm not a big fan of fly-out navigation. Not only because of
> accessibility,
> but also usability. I find my main gripes are:

Hi Darrel,

I want to take this opportunity to link to an article we wrote that
discusses one possible way to integrate a popup/flyout menu system
into an accessible site. Nothing is ever perfect in this field, but we
tried to address a lot of good comments made by some of the folks
here. I also want to apologize for my bull-charge into the list last
week. No matter my reasons, there is never an excuse for that kind of
entrance. That said, I hope that anyone here who is interested in
trying to integrate a popup menu into an accessible site would take a
few moments and read the article, as well as browsing its companion
example site.

http://www.projectseven.com/tutorials/accessibility/pop_integrated/

While we consider our CSS, markup, and scripting end of this equation
as good or better than anything else, the methods discussed in the
article would work for any well-coded menu system, so long as the
system is straightforward and flexible enough to begin with.

Hope this helps someone and do feel free to comment.

Al Sparber
PVII
http://www.projectseven.com

"Designing with CSS is sometimes like barreling down a crumbling
mountain road at 90 miles per hour secure in the knowledge that
repairs are scheduled for next Tuesday".