I posted this awhile back on the Nice Menus issue queue with no response. Wondering if perhaps I am doing something wrong on the accessibility testing front (using WAVE to check site)....or if someone else has experienced this issue as well:
The problem: Within Nice Menus, all drop-down line-items (child links AND parent links) should be displayed for screen readers, but currently, only top level links are displayed...my clients wanted the top level links with secondary levels to be non-clickable parents, which would make much of the site unreachable for those with screen readers...I have changed the functionality on the site referenced here, but it is a recurring issue.
Thought that this might just be some error on my part, but I see that recovery.gov has the same screen reader output issue!
Am I testing wrong or, as it appears, is it imperative to make the all top level items clickable when using Nice Menus?
site: http://www.womensworlds.ca/
theme: adaptation of zen
view of screen reader output: http://wave.webaim.org/report?view=textonly&url=http://www.womensworlds....
many thanks for your input :)
Comments
Interesting problem, Jen: I'll need to study it
Jen, this is an interesting problem. There might be nothing wrong with the page, and it might not be that you're testing it wrong, but simply misinterpreting the results of your test. Thanks for linking to both. I'll have to look at the page and test results again when I have more time to be sure what's going on. Feel free to ping me if I haven't done that by the end of this very hectic week.
And I'm glad to have you participating in this group!
Jen, Cliff -Please - you don't want those sub-menus spoken
I wrote what is quoted below - and then I checked the page with JAWS. The top-level menu items are not seen by JAWS and they are not in the tab order. I have no idea why. Though what I said below is important for menu systems generally - it is not the problem here!!
By the way, http://recovery.gov has lots of problems (http://jimthatcher.com/recovery.htm) but this is not one of them.
Hmmm. Will try to diagnose
Hmmm. Will try to diagnose the issue with main nav not in tab order. Wasn't expecting to hear that. Speculation on cause is welcome; I will post when figure out the answer.
For http://www.womensworlds.ca, I convinced the client to let me link all top level pages to overview pages. Originally top-level nav items with secondary pages were non-linking, and it looked like the secondary items were not accessible. Many thanks for the info, though I am a bit confused as to what is going on in JAWS with my nav...Might need to truck up to my local library to check things out.
I think we're on the same wavelength, Jim
The problem you pointed out — that JAWS is not announcing the top-level menu items — is just what I was going to try to figure out. In the page code (using "View generated source" with the Web developer toolbar), I see that three different classes are being used for those headings:
class="active";class="menuparent menu-path-node-126";class="menu-path-node-26".Is it possible that the key to the problem lies in the attributes of each of those classes? (I think Jen noticed that they do not appear on screen in the linearized version of the page. But they are in the source code of the linearized version, so I was scratching my head over that.)
Those classes don't seem to
Those classes don't seem to have anything odd about them...
.active text-decoration:none; color:#91278f;
.menuparent background-color: #fff; margin-right:0px; padding-right:0px;
menu-path... nothing
hmmmm....
By the way, nice site design
I like what you've done with Zen. That's a fabulous design!
One suggestion to make it even better: Add a link under "Connect. Converse." to a page that prominently features WW2011's Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. I know the information is under that tab (in the right sidebar of each page I hit) if I dig for it. It's also on the home page if I scroll down. But when I clicked "Connect. Converse." I fully expected to find a strong, clear link to a page where I could find all the ways to connect. Because none of the subheads seemed to offer that, I wondered if I had misconstrued the meaning of "Connect. Converse."
And I really don't think I would change anything else about the content beneath that heading. Keep the other items, and have them link to the same pages. Just consider if there's a way to have another item and, as its target, a page where the main content simply lists a link to WW2011's Facebook page, a link to WW2011 on Twitter, and so on.
Thanks for the feedback and
Thanks for the feedback and suggestion.
Great idea.