http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/11/the-case-against-vertical-navigation/
At least it's not a familiar cross-pollination from the desktop where
all users are familiar with horizontal menus.
CB
On 4/7/11 11:34 AM, Scott Gonz�lez wrote:
> Hans, J�rn and I were discussing the menu and menubar implementations
It's probably treading a bit into the area of an edge case as vertical menubars aren't that common in the wild. That said, a screen reader user will only know that it is a menu or menubar and will expect the typical left-right bar navigation with up down to inspect items in a particular category. Visual keyboard users might find it a bit odd to use left/right to navigate a columnar menu, but the cognitive load shouldn't be very high. I think if you flip the keys to make more sense to a visual keyboard user it will have a very disorienting effect for screen reader users as there is no standard way to inform them that the widget is rotated. Lesser of two evils is to leave the keys as they are. We didn't even consider vertical menus in the DHTML Style Guide [http://dev.aol.com/dhtml_style_guide#menu] and I would have to wonder if it isn't bad UI. See
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/11/the-case-against-vertical-navigation/
At least it's not a familiar cross-pollination from the desktop where all users are familiar with horizontal menus.
CB
On 4/7/11 11:34 AM, Scott González wrote:
Hans, Jörn and I were discussing the menu and menubar implementations and we got stuck on the handling for arrow keys. Since nested menus require movement in both directions (horizontal and vertical), the left/right arrow keys can't be treated the same as the up/down arrow keys like they are in many other widgets. We were thinking that we could pick the appropriate keys based on the orientation, but aria-orientation isn't listed as being valid for menu and menubar roles. Is there a recommended solution that makes sense for both sighted and blind users?
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