keyboard accessible menus

[deborah]

Dreamwidth makes its dropdown menus accessible without a mouse by making the top-level items links to lists of the menu items on a new page. There's been a lot of work lately to make complex dropdowns accessible without page reloading. I'm curious what kinds of dropdown menus are accessible to you, our users, whether your disabilities are mobility, visual, cognitive, or something else.

This poll lists the current system as it stands, as well as links to 15 alternative, keyboard-accessible menus (all but the first two are non-real-world examples from Terrill Thompson's awesome resource). I would love if all y'all could test and see which options have reasonable usability for you, no matter what functionality you use to manipulate and view it.

And if you don't know if you should take this poll? If you think you have accessibility needs in any way, please do! I know it's time consuming but I'll love you forever.

Poll #13618 Accessible dropdowns

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 6

View Respondents

Which menus are functional for you?

View Answers

The current system
4 (66.7%)

University if Washington
2 (33.3%)

Adobe (described here)
3 (50.0%)

Interesting Example 1
3 (50.0%)

XHTML Strict
4 (66.7%)

HTML5
4 (66.7%)

Suckerfish
3 (50.0%)

Son of Suckerfish
3 (50.0%)

Superfish
2 (33.3%)

Dropper Dropdown Menu
3 (50.0%)

UDM4
5 (83.3%)

Simply Accessible
4 (66.7%)

YUI
4 (66.7%)

Customized OAA Dropdown
4 (66.7%)

JQuery-ui Menubar Widget
3 (50.0%)

Canadian Government Web Accessibility Toolkit
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[exor674]

In case you need a mostly-normal user perspective, not filling out the poll because "functional" is hard to define for this use case.

From a visual/mouse-user perspective, while trying to be slightly sloppy with the mouse. Except otherwise mentioned, most of the menus ( including Dreamwidth's ) are easy to "fall out of" if you are too "sloppy" with mouse movements.

Adobe seems to be one of the nicest with respect to "falling out" of the menu.

"Superfish" has a "long" delay makes me feel the menu is broken, "Dropper Dropdown Menu" seems to have ... idk what I was gonna say here but it was probably important heh.

"Ultimate Dropdown Menu" seems to be the hardest to fall out of (either menu to menu, or menu to outside) -- the delay is there but doesn't scream "broken" or annoying. "YUI Library MenuNavNode Plugin" is also hard to fall out of, but has a slight delay -- you can at least click to open the menu v.s. "Superfish".

"Canadian Government Web Accessibility Toolkit" 403's and I am not sure if that's where you meant to link.

[deborah]

Doh! I meant to kill that last link but now it's in a poll so it's stuck there.

Also, I am now going to think of you as "Mostly-Normal Dre." :D

Also, THANK YOU.