Review navigation menubar example (menubar-1.html)

[mcking65]

Provide editorial and functional feedback on the
navigation menubar example.

[accdc]

The code and role usage looks good, plus the focus movement.

One note, at present the spec doesn't support the use of aria-expanded on role=menuitem, however this is an important addition that needs to be made in the spec to support touch screen devices. To this end, the following bug has been submitted:
w3c/aria#454

[mcking65]

@a11ydoer

This comment on issue 144
about left/right arrow behavior applies to this example too.

In addition, it would also be very helpful to have some of the submenus to have submenus. So, for example, under academics, give colleges and schools a submenu that has items like engineering, business, Liberal Arts, etc. It would be good to have at least one sub submenu in each menu. You can have the sub/submenus go to the same landing page as their parent ... no need to create more fake landing pages.

[mcking65]

@a11ydoer
I made significant changes to the HTML file with commit 6a24c6c

I did most of the work of updating the example page so it conforms to our example template. It still needs one table of role and property information to be filled in.

[terrill]

It's common in navigation menus for the top-level menu items to be hyperlinks that target a high-level landing page. Therefore these menu items serve two functions:

1. They trigger display of a sub-menu (typically on hover).
2. They serve as a link to a top-level landing page (typically on click).

The current example doesn't account for this dual functionality. Any ideas? Perhaps space could trigger the link, and enter could reveal the submenu?

[terrill]

According to the Nu Html Checker, aria-expanded is not allowed on <a> elements, even with those that have role="menuitem". Is this a bug in the validator or a problem in this example?

[mcking65]

@terrill
WRT aria-expanded on menuitem elements, this is intentional because it better supports touch and works better with screen readers. This task force believes there is an oversight in the ARIA spec and has raised w3c/aria#454. Since 1.1 is already in CR, not sure we will be able to resolve this, officially, in 1.1. I am certain, though, that we will get it resolved.

On the topic of overloading items in the menubar as both elements that open a menu and navigate to a link target, we do not recommend this practice but have acknowledged that having enter and space navigate to the target and down arrow open the menu is a way of handling it. You can see this in the notes of the keyboard section in the design pattern. At this time, we have two different version of that section on the table per issue #120.