Hi all,
Recently I have done some work for Worcestershire County Council and
especially looking at their intranet site to see how accessable it
was.
Unfortunately, the site used pull down menus in order to get the user
to specific places in the site, which were not accessible to screen
readers.
Worst is that if looking at the page, a blind person using screen
readers would not know the menus even existed, because Jaws picks them
up as "this page" links, and if the user hits the enter key on those
links, they are not taken anywhere.
Only with very skilled use of the Jaws navigation cursor and a small
amount of site is it possible to navigate to those menus and view
them.
Unfortunately, I have also noticed quite a few univercities (I have
seen around five sites) also use this approach, as do other sites such
as Microsoft.
While I can see the benefit of these menus, it would be nice to have
alternative links provided (hopefully something that could be
remembered site-wide in a cookie perhaps), which would help to give VI
users the accessability to the site.
I am not sure what the makers of Jaws and Window eyes stance is on
this issue, currently though the code for these menus require the
pointer to be physically over the menu objects, which screen readers
do not currently do in order to get the relevant information accross
to the end user.
I have contacted relevant webmasters at the univercities who are
affected by this.
Hope this helps,
Andrew.
--
Andrew Hodgson, Bromyard, Herefordshire, UK.
Email: [log in to unmask]
|