Re: javascript menus and accessibility

Some problems:

If the scripts/applets are required in order to get to the menus, then some
users won't ever see them - there are a number of text-to-speech browsers
without javascript support. And there are a number of people who can more or
les only navigate using the keyboard, so using mouse events is a big
problem...

It is not always clear that a dropdown has appeared/disappeared.

There is a known problem with the use of onChange selectors for menus in
Javascript, when a user is navigating via the keyboard. What happens is that
they select the menu, and move from the first entry to the second. That fires
the selector. So in allist of countries, it is the first one that is always
selected, since it is impossible to get past that.

CHeers

Charles McCN

On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Dey Alexander wrote:

  Howdy,

  I was wondering if anyone could tell me whether drop down menus, of the
  type that are activated by a javascript or applet rollover, present
  accessibility problems for text-to-speech browsers.

  An example (an applet version) of what I'm concerned about can be found
  at: http://www.buseco.monash.edu.au/oldTechServ/

  Cheers,
  Dey


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
September - November 2000:
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Received on Sunday, 17 December 2000 09:18:33 UTC