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

[ex_rising236]

Most of these function okay for me, but the ones that I've clicked that actually work are ones where I can get the menu to drop down, and then accidentally mouse away or something, and not lose it. Otherwise, cognitively, dropdown menus are a lot of strain and I tend to go through and just navigate by going to the category pages like we have currently.

[erika]

What they said.