Comments on: Using WAI-ARIA Roles and States with the YUI Menu Control

By: Enhancing TabView Accessibility with WAI-ARIA Roles and States » Yahoo! User Interface Blog

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:11:16 +0000

[…] Using WAI-ARIA Roles and States with the YUI Menu Control […]

By: hip london

hip london — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:04:18 +0000

Thank you for the article.
I think your article help so many users with their WAI-ARIA and before I have some troubles to use it with keyboard only because you remove the menu from the tab order.
Your article is very usable for me. Thank you. :)

By: Kevin Decker

Kevin Decker — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:44:05 +0000

Thank you for the article.

Hopefully this is not too off topic, but it seemed applicable.

I just wanted to let the community know about a particular nasty bug that I experienced while using the YUI menu with the above ARIA attributes. Our code was calling menu.render with the appendToNode parameter defined every time the content of the menu changed (Which is admittedly a poor practice).

On the second call to render, JAWS would read “Context Menu, Use up or down keys to navigate” and exit out of Virtual Cursor mode, in favor of PC Cursor mode. After this occurred, JAWS would not return to virtual cursor mode, regardless page reloads, Ins+Z toggling, etc. The only way that I was able to restore virtual cursor mode was to restart the Firefox instance.

By: Victor

Victor — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 20:17:02 +0000

Gregory,
Thank you for your comment. This has been discussed on our corporate blog at http://yodel.yahoo.com. Short answer: alternative is in the works.

Goetsu,
Thank you for staying on topic. You can effectively use the menu widget even if you do not use screen reader. The desktop-like keyboard navigation applies to this menu as well, i.e. use arrow keys to traverse, ESCAPE to exit out of menus.

By: goetsu

goetsu — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 10:02:20 +0000

Great example of ARIA implementation.

I have some troubles to use it with keyboard only because you remove the menu from the tab order. Some people use the keyboard to navigate without a screen reader and for them I didn’t found a way to use the menu.

By: Gregory J. Rosmaita

Gregory J. Rosmaita — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 04:30:56 +0000

could you please apply these principles of equal access to the yahoo account creation interface? currently, it is necessary to pass a visual turing test in order to create an account, which means that those who cannot process the visual challange, cannot join the community… why isn’t there an aural alternative to the visual-only “challange”? what steps is yahoo taking to ensure that its backplane is enhanced by the work of yahoo employees in the field of accessibility?

i applaud the addition of WAI-ARIA to the YUI Menu Control, but my applause is tempered by the fact that one cannot fully participate in these fora unless one can visually process an image…