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esmi 3:56 pm on January 8, 2013 Permalink
Tags: core ( 10 )   

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  Graham Armfield 9:43 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink

  Thanks for posting about that Esmi, I believe it is vital that everyone who maintains a site in WordPress should be able to fully create their own menus.

  Of course at the moment the order of menu items and the hierarchy can’t be changed without the ability to drag and drop – an alien concept for some people and for some assistive technology like screen readers.

  Sighted keyboard users can manipulate menus if they know about mouse keys, and speech recognition users can do drag and drop commands although it’s hard to get things precise enough some times.

  But, how to make the menu builder accessible to everyone?

  Is the best way to add an accessible option – similar to the one that exists for managing Widgets (which has similar-ish functionality)?

  Or is there another way that would work better for everyone?

  And (perhaps similar to other areas within WP) are there sufficient instructions clearly available so that everyone understands what they are changing and how to go about it?

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    esmi 11:48 am on January 9, 2013 Permalink

    Adding an accessibility option similar to the widgets one has to be the absolute minimum fallback, in my opinion. I’ve already seen calls elsewhere on the support forums for it to be added to menus. It would also lend itself nicely to some sort of consistency across the WordPress UI.

    Are there any other web applications with accessible drag and drop functionality that we could use as a best practice model?

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      Cyndy Otty 1:56 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink

      From the standpoint of a blind person “accessible drag-and-drop” is kind of an oxymoron . . . it’s inherently a mouse-user feature and those are notoriously difficult, if not impossible to translate to use for a screen-reader user.

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        esmi 2:17 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink

        Do you find the accessibility option in the Widgets section useful? Would a similar option for Menus help?

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          Cyndy Otty 2:20 pm on January 9, 2013 Permalink

          I do actually. I think I’ve voiced a similar suggestion for that in the Menu screen before. (Seems like something I’d natter on about.)

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    GrahamArmfield 9:48 am on January 11, 2013 Permalink

    Just to let everyone know there is a whole load of debate about the UI for Menus going on over at: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/23119 but so far there is no mention of accessibility in there.

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    GrahamArmfield 12:12 pm on February 6, 2013 Permalink

    Just to let people know there is still much debate going on about the new UI for custom menu builder. You can follow it here: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/23119 and there is a big thread on http://make.wordpress.org/ui/ too.

    So far I’ve seen no real mention of addressing the accessibility issues – either with the existing functionality, or with any of the proposed functionality. I’m of course specifically talking about the drag and drop nature of setting the menu order and hierarchy.

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      esmi 12:54 pm on February 6, 2013 Permalink

      I’m just wondering if we should create a new Trac ticket regarding the menu system’s accessibility issues. It seems to me that it might be possible to re-use the accessibility option currently available for the Widgets on the Menus too. Thoughts?