Re: making asp.net menu control accessible
- From: "Octavian Rasnita" <orasnita@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 5 May 2008 09:35:02 +0300
Why "overload"?
All the menus which are static, which don't use AJAX for retrieving
dynamicly the elements of a certain menu after clicking on it, use much more
html code than that menu.
I never needed to create dynamicly generated menus by Javascript, because I
always need to use the same set of menus everywhere, and if I would need
something different in a certain page, it is much more simple to create
another template with another menu because I don't need to create a server
side program that provides data with the menu elements that should be got
with an AJAX request.
Octavian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jennifer Sutton" <jsuttondc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <programmingblind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, May 04, 2008 12:47 AM
Subject: Re: making asp.net menu control accessible
Octavian and others who may be interested:
I've seen this menu-system discussed many times, elsewhere, and the one
caution, among others I've read, is that the way that all the lists of
links (with their nesting) is shown can really overload readers who are
not blind.
I know this is the blind programming list, but personally, I like to keep
in mind that it's important to balance what might work great for us,
against what might actually pose accessibility challenges to folks with
disabilities other than blindness.
Jennifer
At 06:43 AM 5/3/2008, you wrote:
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).
<snip>
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