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Pop Menu Magic 2 Accessibility guide

The best Dreamweaver menu tool is also the most accessible. That's a big advantage for you and your visitors.

Accessibility matters to us

Web accessibility means that a web site's navigation, information, and features are usable by people with normal or impaired abilities in all types of browsing devices. PMM2 provides you with the means to deliver an interactive CSS/DOM Scripted menu system that no other Dreamweaver menu tool can provide. This article will show you how PMM2 accessibility features work and how you can deploy them to deliver the most accessible menu possible.

Q: What do Assistive Readers, keyboard surfers, iPhones, iPads, Androids, Windows Touch, and JavaScript-disabled devices have in common with the latest high-end Windows and Mac desktop computers?

Answer: Pop Menu Magic 2 works on all of them.

Default iPhone, iPad, iPod and Android support

Support for touch-enabled devices is a default feature built into Pop Menu Magic 2 (version 1.4.0 or higher). This feature is fully transparent to people using a mouse. For them, the menu will work as expected onmouseover. For an iPhone or iPad user, the menu will work by touch—that is, when a user taps a trigger link its sub-menu will appear and be fully accessible.

Tap once and the sub-menu opens.

Tap again and the system launches a linked page if there is a valid link on the trigger. On the second tap, the system will close the sub menu if there isn't a valid link on the trigger.

Default keyboard browsing support

Our usability testing indicates that a surprising number of people use the keyboard, rather than a mouse, to surf the web. While some people have physical impairments that limit or prevent them from using a mouse, other people simply prefer to use their keyboards instead of a mouse (or laptop touch pad). Pop Menu Magic's default settings allow keyboard surfers to use their tab keys to access menu items and to open sub-menus in the expected way, by pressing their Enter or Return keys. Sub-menus can be closed by a second hit on the trigger link or by pressing the ESC key.

What happens when JavaScript is disabled?

Estimates of how many people browse with script disabled range from 1%-5%. It's probably closer to 1% but your particular market could vary. When script is disabled, PMM2 presents users with a pure CSS menu that works using CSS li:hover. Pure CSS menus do have some usability issues if you go beyond 2 menu levels and will not work in MSIE 6 (or under).

Passive accessibility

If you have landing pages for each section of your web site, and those landing pages contain links to all pages in that section, your site will be accessible to everyone. Consider this menu structure:

  • Home
  • Hats
    • Mens Hats
    • Ladies Hats
  • Contact Us

Home and Contact Us have no sub-menus so they are simply links to the Home and Contact Us pages. Hats, however, has a sub-menu which includes Mens Hats and Ladies Hats. Hats, therefore, is a Trigger Link. To make your menu fully accessible create a page called Hats. The Hats page would be an introduction page that talks about hats in general and that also contains (apart from the menu) links to the Mens Hats and Ladies Hats pages.

Notes and thoughts

Accessibility is a very subjective and situational endeavor. We've engineered some very advanced capabilities into PMM2 that allow you to choose from among several accessibility methods. The method you choose, or whether you choose one at all, is entirely up to you and can be tailored to your own accessibility vision.

In closing, there is simply no other Dreamweaver menu tool that will afford you this level and scope of accessibility.