Re: [orca-list] Is there anything which can be done with orca or is this website's navigation inaccessible?

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis googlemail com>]

Michael Whapples wrote:
> I
> wonder is there anything orca could be made to do to work with it (my
> thought being that the text itself is actually available as text), or is
> it going to be a case to report to the site's owner that it is
> inaccessible and an alternative needs to be provided (which isn't too
> good as its for disabled people, and obviously is expected to be used by
> the blind as they cover things for the blind and have a forum for the
> blind).

Dropdown menus for content sites aren't usually a good idea and tend to 
be poorly implemented to boot. This particular dropdown menu 
implementation is pretty bad. There's no navigation without JavaScript 
and you can't open the submenus with the keyboard. Also the menu items 
aren't links so they can't receive ordinary keyboard focus, recognized 
as links by assistive technology, or followed by search engine crawlers. 
They're just text elements with script functionality attached to their 
click events.

In terms of getting personal access to it, you could pull URLs out of 
the script that matches menu items to the URLs:

http://www.shootonline.org/menuitems.js

In terms of getting the site fixed, you could direct the webmaster to 
the guidance provided by the World Wide Web Consortium's Web 
Accessibility Initiative:

http://www.w3.org/WAI/

and some somewhat better dropdown menu implementations:

http://www.udm4.com/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/menu/

There's also a good discussion of the subject in the blog post and 
comments at:

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200705/accessible_expanding_and_collapsing_menu/

Hope that helps.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis