[Style Guide] Menu description needs to be more specific

The minutes of the July 13, 2007 DHTML Style Guide meeting  [1] contain a 
proposal for menu navigation.  While I agree with the current menu 
navigation proposal, I believe it needs to be more detailed.  I submitted 
a proposal on February 26, 2007 [2]  which I believe provides additional 
details to address both menus and menubars.  I have repeated the proposal 
here and tried to format it with more whitespace than in the original post 
to (hopefully) make it easier to read.


-First item in menu bar should be in the tab order (tabindex=0). 

-When a menu bar item has focus and no menu is open, pressing left or 
right arrow will cycle focus to the other menu bar items. 

-When a menu bar item has focus, pressing enter or space should open the 
menu and place focus on the first menu item in the opened menu or child 
menu bar

-When a menu bar item has focus, pressing the up or down arrow should open 
the menu and place focus on the first menu item in the opened menu or 
child menubar.

-With focus on an menu item in an open menu, pressing up or down arrow 
should cycle focus through the items in that menu.

-When focus is on a menu item that has a submenu, pressing enter or space 
should open the submenu and put focus on the first submenu item.

-Pressing escape with focus on an open menu item should close the open 
menu or submenu and return focus to the parent menu item

-With focus on an menu item, pressing enter or space should invoke that 
menu action (which may be to open a submenu). 

-When a menu item has focus and that item has a submenu, pressing right 
arrow should open the submenu for that item and place focus on the first 
item in the opened submenu

-With focus on a sub menu item, up or down arrows should cycle through the 
submenu items (behaves the same as open menu)

-With focus on a sub menu item, pressing left arrow will close the submenu 
and return focus to the parent menu item

-Disabled menu items receive focus but have no action when enter or 
left/right arrow is pressed.

-Tabbing out of the menu component will close any open menus. 

-With focus on a menu item and a sub menu opened via mouse behavior, 
pressing down arrow will move focus to the first item in the sub menu.

-With focus on a menu item and a sub menu opened via mouse 
behavior,pressing up arrow will move focus to the last item in the sub 
menu.

-With focus on a submenu item, the user must use arrows or the escape key 
to progressively close submenus and move up to the parent item(s).



[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007Jul/0142.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007Feb/0032.html

Becky Gibson
Web Accessibility Architect
                                                       
IBM Emerging Internet Technologies
5 Technology Park Drive
Westford, MA 01886
Voice: 978 399-6101; t/l 333-6101
Email: gibsonb@us.ibm.com
blog: WebA11y

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2007 19:28:01 UTC