11 Accessibility -- Works in JAWS

I just tested the bare-bones version in JAWS 4.5, and it worked beautifully. JAWS read the menus as normal lists and sublists. The links were also available via the List Links command (Insert + F7), commonly used by users to cut to the chase.

I see no problems with this drop-down menu approach and JAWS 4.5.

posted at 11:18 am on November 7, 2003 by Justin Cone

12 What about IE with JS deactivated?

The fallback option for non-css browsers is clear: plain HTML.

What about IE with JS deactivated?

That’s 13-15% of all users, a group too large to get served plain HTML.

posted at 11:51 am on November 7, 2003 by Marek Moehling

13 Re: What about IE with JS deactivated?

Making the dropdown titles link to a certain section will mean those users won’t get the full multi-level functionality of the dropdown menus but they will have single-level navigational menu.

If they are used as an extra navigational tool (as discussed), they can simply be seen as a bonus to those with scripting capabilities rather than a detriment to those without.

posted at 12:03 pm on November 7, 2003 by Patrick Griffiths

14 IE display bug

When I went to the pretty example, with the OSX like drop downs with the latest IE6 on XP, the menus “flash” as I mouse between options. What happens is that the background (the light gray lines) disapears and then reloads. It’s really annoying. I checked in Opera and it was (predictably) smooth, so is there any idea why this is happening for IE6?

posted at 12:36 pm on November 7, 2003 by David Ondrik

15 Re: IE display bug

I have seen this display bug a lot in old versions of mozilla and netscape 7, but never in IE although I have seen many others.

In netscape/moz the problem was always to do with using ‘visibility:hidden’ or ‘display:none’ to hide menus with anchor tags. The solution was to position the menu ‘off-stage’ when in it’s off state – simply done by changing the positioning value to something like ‘top:-100px’. In this way you never need to change the visibility or display states so it works around the bug.

I have IE6 on XP and I see no problem whatsoever by the way, but if you think it is a problem then try my suggestion as a bug fix.

posted at 12:51 pm on November 7, 2003 by Jon B

16 Opera, nothing happens

I don’t see anything happening in Opera 7.21 but in Moz1.5 I do (Win2k).

posted at 02:45 pm on November 7, 2003 by Julian Rickards

17 Thank you for a beautiful example

Thanks for a clearly written article with clean, compact standards-compliant code. Very well done.

posted at 02:49 pm on November 7, 2003 by Doug Baker

18 Impressive!

Dan

Many congratulations on producing this and circumventing some of the bugs in browsers. I’m going to test it on JAWS next week when I can (Thursday or Friday) so that we can prove its accessibility with users who need this technology.

Must remember to take biscuits for his guide dog.

posted at 02:53 pm on November 7, 2003 by John Colby

19 My work on the same thing

Dan, Patrick, congratulations on the good work.

I’m working on the same thing, and have got pretty far. You can check it out at –

http://www.aplus.co.yu/Sparks/ADxMenu/

At first, I was thinking on doing similar to what you did, using CSS at fullest and then compensating for IE’s lack of :hover support.

I gave that up because of real world usability problems (I’m developing the menu and use it at the same time at the client web site).

I reverted to larger Javascript use to be able to accomodate problems like:

- large menu list goes off the visible screen area – icon support (item icon and submenu arrow) – problems with menu being used in the pos:relative and float:left or right layouts, when in IE you have all kinds of overlapping. – easy switch between vertical and horizontal use

Part of these problems and how I solved them can be seen in the three posts I have at the address above. I plan to add another post with some new tweaks I dealt with, this weekend.

Also, as the menu is used on the bookmaker’s web wite with lots of forms, I added the code that deals with windowed controls punching through the menu layers.

Feel free to use any of the code in your future work (which I assume is GPL or CC based), as I will certainly review my code based on what you two published here and possibly simplify it.

posted at 03:15 pm on November 7, 2003 by Aleksandar Vacić

20 Re: My work on the same thing

Some of the problems you mention could actually be solved with CSS:
icon support by using backgound images,
IE problem with position and float with the the li > ul bit mentioned in the article,
horizontal display using position or display properties.

posted at 03:41 pm on November 7, 2003 by Patrick Griffiths