Controls for drop down menus

Hi Hillary,

Firstly I would like to thank you for providing this service of helping people with 508 questions.

We are developing and application using infragistic controls for drop down menus, grids, etc.

I wanted to know if these controls are 508 compliant?

Is there a 508 requirement that the web page has to be navigable using a key board besides the mouse?

I ask this because we have a control where the user mouse over’s a link and there is a drop down that rolls out with sub categories.

These can be selected by the mouse but are not accessible by the tab key on the key board. Would this be a violation of 508 requirements?

Thank you very much,

Rina

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ANSWER
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Hello Rina,

What a great question. The short answer is no, these controls are not 508 compliant.

The following standard is excerpted from Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, §1194.21. For the full text of Section 508, please see http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/standards.htm


(a) When software is designed to run on a system that has a keyboard, product functions shall be executable from a keyboard where the function itself or the result of performing a function can be discerned textually.

One way to ensure this support is through the use of NOSCRIPT tags, as in this JavaScript example:



<SCRIPT language="JavaScript">

<!-- function popwin(){

window.open('http://www.mywebsite.com/mypage.htm','','width=400,height=200');

} // --> </script>

<noscript> This pages used JavaScript to display a pop-up window that points a user to <a href="http://mywebsite.com/popup.html">My Web Page Title</a></noscript>



Another approach is the use of navigational redundancy. Each page of the site should have a textual links to (at least) all top level sections of the site, along with a link to a sitemap which lists every page in the site.

Using onfocus and onblur attributes in conjunction with onmouseover and onmouseout attributes can also help make your controls accessible.

Finally, test the final product. There are quite a few software packages that will let you know if a website/page is compliant. There are also Internet groups whose members have access to JAWS and other assistive technology. Check out the mailing list at WEBAIM: http://www.webaim.org/discussion/ for one such list.

SAMSA is proud to offer simple accessibility reports and recommendations to organizations interested in providing access to all.

Thanks for writing,

Hillary Norfleet
Accessible Web Development