I was also searching these days for a javascript accessible menu, and I've tried the widgets offered by DOJO, extJS, YUI and a few others, and some of them provide a pretty accessible menu, but finally I found that the best one is provided by:
http://www.udm4.com/The menus are created very easy, with a list of bulleted lists, which could have other sub-lists and the elements of those list become menu elements. The menus can be configured to be horizontal, vertical, pop-up, and there may be changed many other options. For example, I have chosen to put an image after the menu elements that have submenus with an alt attribute of "SubMenu", so when I tab to the element that has submenus, Jaws speaks the name of the menu element than "SubMenu", and it also looks nice for the sighted.
I think what I like more is the fact that for the screen readers, all the menus are shown like a common list of sub-lists, and I don't need to click on the menu name, then on the sub-menu, then on the sub-sub-menu in order to access the page I want, because I can see all the links directly. The main list elements can also be defined as headings, so they can be reached more easy and another advantage is that it works even without Javascript, and all the links from the menus are indexable by search engines.
It works much better than other menus created by the Javascript libraries like DOJO, YUI, etc, because it doesn't use a table, but a bulleted list, so the screen reader can announce us the level of the list so we can understand better the structure of the menu.
It even has an option for using SAPI for speaking the menus, but I don't think it is very utile, and it could also be configured to be used with the keyboard by the sighted, but I couldn't try this either (and it doesn't affect us anyway).
I've also seen a tree view made with .net (on www.bvb.ro) but I don't know if it was made with an asp.net class, or with an external Javascript library. It is very accessible, although it is not nice that it require clicking on each tree node in order to allow us see the tree elements of that node, and it also doesn't speak the level of the elements so it is hard to know the structure of a more complex tree view.
Octavian----- Original Message ----- From: "Ricks Place" <OFBGMail@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2008 1:32 PM Subject: Re: making asp.net menu control accessible Hi:I use it too. In it's current state it renders as a table. If you tab to the item you want to expand, route the mouse there and mouse down arrow you should get the pull down iteems for that tab item. Of course this will depend on how you have the dynamic and static levels set and your citemap file configuration. You might make the static levels greater than all the levels you have and then you could walk the items with the cursor until you find the one you want. There are the css friendly control adapters, ugh! that will let you render the menu control as a list but I have not messed with them. I just route the mouse to the top level item I am interested in and then use the mouse down arrow to select an option. Again, much depends on if your control is set up Horizontally or vertically and the static and dynamic levels you show. Let me know if this does not work and a little about your control's settings.
Rick Farmington Mich. USA----- Original Message ----- From: Alexandre Alves Tôco
To: programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Friday, May 02, 2008 9:54 PM Subject: making asp.net menu control accessibleHi friends. I use .net framework 2.0 to build some webpages. Asp.net provide a menu control. But I can't figure out how to make the menu accessible.
Does any one have a hint?
Regards, Alexandre.
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