RE: Question about a menubutton with a default action

Personally, I’d recommend the same as Matt.

The problem with the split button functionality, is that it’s not intuitive and there is no indication to the user how it is supposed to work. Case in point, I’ve been using Win7 for a couple of years now and have shut down my computer thousands of times in that time, but never knew this dual functionality existed till you mentioned how to use it.

From: Marco Zehe [mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2014 10:57 PM
To: Bryan Garaventa
Cc: James Craig; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: Question about a menubutton with a default action

Sorry about that! ;) Any suggestions on how to proceed? Should I just see that we expose this as a split button somehow, and count on users to know how to interact, or should I try and push for a change to what Matt suggested? I personally would feel better with the latter, but am not sure how hard this fight might become. Moreover, there is no ARIA role for split buttons AFAIK. At least I didn't find one. And in Windows 8.1, this thing is no longer a split button, it has no role whatsoever, but acts like a normal menu button.
Suggestions still welcome!
Marco

On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 7:48 AM, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com<mailto:bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>> wrote:
Ah, I see what you mean, I just shut down my computer twice by accident trying to test this thing using Space and Enter…

It’s not the Down arrow that opens the popup menu items, but Right arrow, which makes it act like a submenu of a parent menu item.

I guess it’s theoretically possible to do this using ARIA on a menu item, if a proper description is added, but this would only work within a menu, and not on a standalone button, because the modes of navigation are totally different.


From: Marco Zehe [mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com<mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com>]
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2014 10:29 PM
To: Bryan Garaventa
Cc: James Craig; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats

Subject: Re: Question about a menubutton with a default action

Hi Bryan,
no, he is referring to the split button that is in the start menu. In fact, another colleague chimed in that this control is meant to be a clone of Microsoft's split button rather than menu button. He also quotes (although without an actual reference) that Microsoft suggest Space to perform the default action, and DownArrow to open a menu of the default + other options. The access key should open the menu, with the default option highlighted.
I just checked, and WAI-ARIA doesn't mention split buttons at all, neither in the spec nor in the authoring practices.
Marco

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com<mailto:bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>> wrote:
Is he referring to the dialog that pops up if you press Alt+F4 when the desktop has focus?

This is a “combo box” in the Accessibility Tree, not a button.



From: Marco Zehe [mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com<mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com>]
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2014 12:09 PM
To: James Craig
Cc: Bryan Garaventa; W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Re: Question about a menubutton with a default action

Hi Matt, Birkir, and Bryan,
any thoughts on the example one of our developers gives in comment 24<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653226#c24> of the relevant Mozilla bug? Namely the example that aaparently stood model for our interaction: the Windows 7 shutdown button menu thingie on the Start panel.
Windows 8.1 no longer has that, it's a regular menu button there that opens on press of the Space bar.
Marco

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 7:41 PM, James Craig <jcraig@apple.com<mailto:jcraig@apple.com>> wrote:
I was going to echo Matt's sentiment here. These are two controls, a button and a second popup button that launches a menu (aka menu button). When each is focused, Spacebar or Return should activate either. When the menu is launched, focus should move into the menu and arrow keys should manipulate the selected menu item.

As for the authoring guide:
•

     *   With focus on the button and the drop-down menu open, pressing Down Arrow will move focus into the menu onto the first menu item.


That needs to say "selected menu item or first menu item."


On Aug 8, 2014, at 10:24 AM, Marco Zehe <marco.zehe@gmail.com<mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com>> wrote:

Bryan, I totally second your view that Space should open the menu as well. It always drives me nuts if a menu button does not do it, like some on FaceBook, for example. The ones on Google like in Gmail don't require me to switch out of virtual mode to get them popped up, on FaceBook, they do.
I would, therefore, second a change to the authoring guide to this effect. Strongly! :)
Marco

On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 7:15 PM, Bryan Garaventa <bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com<mailto:bryan.garaventa@ssbbartgroup.com>> wrote:
Regarding the use of the Down arrow to trigger a menu, I believe this exposes an issue in the ARIA authoring guide at
http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#menubutton


Where it states:

Keyboard Interaction:


  *   Space or Enter - With focus on the button pressing Space or Enter will toggle the display of the drop-down menu. Focus remains on the button.
  *   Down Arrow -
     *   With focus on the button and no drop-down menu displayed, pressing Down Arrow will open the drop-down menu and move focus into the menu and onto the first menu item.
     *   With focus on the button and the drop-down menu open, pressing Down Arrow will move focus into the menu onto the first menu item.
  *   Up and Down Arrow - With focus on the drop-down menu, the Up and Down Arrow keys move focus within the menu items, "wrapping" at the top and bottom.
  *   Escape - With focus on the drop-down menu, pressing Escape closes the menu and returns focus to the button.
  *   Tab -
     *   With focus on the button pressing the Tab key will take the user to the next tab focusable item on the page.
     *   With focus on the drop-down menu, pressing the Tab key will take the user to the next tab focusable item on the page. Note that this may be difficult to achieve on a web page.
  *   Typing a letter (printable character) key moves focus to the next instance of a visible node whose title begins with that printable letter.


If focus remains on the button when the Enter or Space key is pressed, there is no indication that a menu has opened for an AT user, which is why setting focus to the first menu item works best for invoking the correct navigational mode as well as for indicating that an action has occurred. Also, the paradigm for invoking a menu on the platform always moves focus into a menu, so that the arrow keys can be immediately used for navigation.

Additionally, if the Down arrow is used to invoke a menu, it doesn’t account for ATs like screen readers that use virtual offscreen models such as JAWS and NVDA, where the Down arrow moves to the next line in the virtual buffer, and is never passed through to the button.


From: Marco Zehe [mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com<mailto:marco.zehe@gmail.com>]
Sent: Friday, August 08, 2014 3:58 AM

To: W3C WAI Protocols & Formats
Subject: Question about a menubutton with a default action


Hi there!
I need some advice here... You know in Firefox, we have these doorhangers that pop up when, for example, a site asks you if you want to save a password. The button to save the password is actually a menu button with a default action, and a downward pointing arrow to open a menu of more options. That menu doesn't currently contain the default action. So the mouse interaction is: Click on the left side, e. g. the button label, performs the default action of saving the password. Clicking on the downard pointing arrow will open the popup menu.
The current keyboard interaction is buggy at best. The access key doesn't work correctly, and the button has two tab stops, one for the menu button piece, one for the default action.
Now, I've read up on the default expected behavior for menubuttons<http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#menubutton>, but these don't cover the case of a menu button that also has a default action. Nor is there a different role available in IA2 or other platform APIs that I know of that would cover this scenario in a way that the end user immediately knows what's going on.
My first reaction to the question of how this interaction should be, was this:

  1.  Pressing the access key should focus the menubutton, but not activate anything.
  2.  Space should activate the default action.
  3.  Down Arrow should open the menu.

The problem here is that current best practices suggest that both space and down arrow pop up the menu. And there is no good way to actually tell the user that space would, in this case, do the default action and set focus back on the page afterwards.

Any ideas or suggestion on how to best solve this would be appreciated. We could do an ARIA description for this particular button that tells the users on focus that space will submit the default action, and down arrow opens the menu for more options. But the best way would be if we had a best practices guide somewhere that would include this special scenario, or settle on a good way forward for these in general.

Welcoming your comments!

Marco





--
Indifference towards people and the reality in
which they live is actually the one and only
cardinal sin in design. — Dieter Rams