accessibilitydreamweaverspry

How to make the sprymenubar navigable by keyboard


The spry menu bar as autogenerated by Dreamweaver (CS4/5/6) (all defaults maintained)

According to the API you can enable keyboard navigation by changing the boolean value enableKeyboardNavigation in the list of parameters as such:

 var MenuBar1 = new Spry.Widget.MenuBar("MenuBar1", {imgRight:"SpryAssets/SpryMenuBarRightHover.gif", enableKeyboardNavigation: true}, );

Unfortunately this does not appear to work. According to other sources I could find (a few years old) the keyboard navigation is itself buggy; making it preferable to design one's own interface.

Tabbing the menu is successful - but will not prompt flyout sub menus - meaning that all submenu navigation through tabbing is blind (ironically that is, unless all css and javascript is stripped away, thus revealing the base html unordered list and hrefs).


Solution

  • Much to my surprise, keyboard interaction (via arrow keys) is enabled by default. Tabbing is only suitable for selecting non-submenu items.