I have been toiling over this for weeks now, researching solutions that others have developed for fully keyboard-navigable menus (both for sited users that have physical impairments and for non-sighted users that rely on assistive technology such as JAWS). I have a drop-down menu script that I've built for our state agencies at the State of Minnesota and it works quite well....but I am having one problem: JAWS has reserved both the use of arrow keys and the space bar.
The example menu I hyperlinked above allows you to navigate through the entire menu one of two ways: using arrow keys to drill down through the menus and traverse back up again, or using a combination of the tab and shift-tab keys to navigate and the spacebar to toggle the visibility (and accessibility) of submenus. It works fine when you are just using a browser without JAWS or on the Mac if you use Safari along with VoiceOver. Furthermore with VoiceOver and Safari, you can navigate through the menu with either the arrow keys or the tab keys with space bar to toggle subnavigation visibility.
So I'm at a loss as what to do for JAWS users. What keyboard event can I use to toggle the display of submenus without conflicting with keyboard shortcuts that are reserved by JAWS?
is supposed to be the menu, but the first level items with submenus don't announce they have a submenu unless you assign role="menu" to each of the first level LI tags. That can't be right, can it?
– michael t Aug 27 '14 at 18:08