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

[Michael Whapples <mwhapples aim com>]

I felt it would be that way, that as it stands it is inaccessible.

I will pass on those links along with an explaination of the problem for
me. As a question regarding what to advise, I have found other sites
where the menu systems seem "accessible" but behave differently with
different screen readers, and so being difficult to use (or in some
cases to appear inaccessible) with certain assistive technology, so
might it be better to suggest a plain link navigation alternative as
well (eg. should javascript be unavailable, or every page has a link to
a site map)?

Michael Whapples
On Sun, 2008-09-07 at 00:55 +0100, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:
> 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