Re: ARIA Drop Down and Combo button behavior

I like the Mac implementation of this.  When I come across a combobox  
for instance, it looks like a drop down and vice versa, It is called  
a pop up.  I might be rong though.  In any case, I get to read the  
action the button will perform such as age or color before opening  
the button with the space bar.  Once open, one good implementation  
I've seen is that there is a null choice at the top of the list shown  
as "--" or some similar string.  I'm not happpy but can live with  
landing on the first item although I have no particular reason for  
this.  In a state picker, I always land onn Alabama when I hit space  
on the button.  If I'm going to land on anything, I'd rather it be  
Maryland <g>

On Feb 8, 2007, at 11:47 AM, Becky Gibson wrote:

I need to implement drop down and combo buttons so I hacked together a
simple example.   I created it in XHTML so I could add the attributes
directly into the markup and created  some simple functions to give the
basic behavior.   Since this is XHTML and uses a content-type of
application/xhtml+xml it will only work in Firefox.

A drop down button is a button that opens a menu when activated.  I  
think
the drop down button implementation in the example is acceptable.  I  
gave
the button a role of button with a popup.  Activating the button  
opens up
a context menu and both JAWS 8 and WE 6 will speak context menu so the
user should get the idea that the button action is to open up a menu.  
Then
you can down arrow into the menu.  Right now you have to open the menu
then arrow to it - the alternative would be to open the menu AND set  
focus
to the first menu item when the button is activated.

The more difficult scenario is the combo button where activating the
button performs a default action and you can open an associated context
menu.  Generally this is implemented as a button with two sections - the
text and a down arrow to open the menu.    I have created two
implementations.   In one I create just one tab stop for the button  
in the
second scenario I create a tab stop for the button/default action and
another tab stop for the part of the button that opens the popup menu.
JAWS actually does pretty well with both types.

  The case where there is only one tab stop has a role of menu.  The  
idea
is that the user would hear menu and default option and then open the  
menu
and select an action - the default action would be the first menu  
choice.
JAWS does speak it as a menu but  WE doesn't work with it very well.  I
can get WE to speak that the "button" is a menu but not speak the action
of "save":

In the second implementation of the combo button I made the default  
action
a button and the drop down arrow a button. It seems kind of odd to have
two separate buttons but I didn't think the role of menu on the arrow
button was correct.  I guess the arrow should just be an  
implementation of
the drop down button - although in this case activating the button opens
the menu and immediately sets focus to the first menu choice (which is
different from what I did in the top drop down button - I'm not sure  
which
one is preferred).

So, which implementation of the combo button do you prefer?   Do you  
think
we need an additional role to better describe these type of buttons?
What about the behavior of the drop down button, when the menu is opened
should focus go immediately to the first menu item or should the user be
expected to press the down arrow?





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

<combo_box_arrow.png>
<menuButton.xhtml>

Received on Thursday, 8 February 2007 17:08:02 UTC