Intended audience: Website owners, website visitors
What is an accessible menu?
An accessible menu allows users to interact with a site's navigation menus in an accessible format. It is accessed by a link that is visibly hidden until it receives focus from a keyboard user.
If a user activates this link, an accessible menu matching the original structure is displayed.
Is an accessible menu necessary?
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Guideline 2.1: Keyboard Accessible dictates that all functionality on a website must be available using only a keyboard. If a website’s menu is not keyboard accessible, it must be made accessible either at the source or by applying an accessible menu implementation.
Can automation build an accessible menu?
No. While automation can find issues that indicate a menu may be inaccessible, it cannot reliably fix the wide variety of menu implementations. In fact, many competitors' solutions have been criticized for making the site experience worse for users by attempting to apply a one-size-fits-all solution to navigation menus. Poor implementation examples include taking away user choice by forcing users to interact with menu overlays, failing to respect important menu structures such as nested submenus, and not pulling in all menu or submenu items from the original menu. AudioEye does not engage in these unacceptable practices.
AudioEye developers apply accessible menus to websites that have purchased custom fixes when the original menus on the site are inaccessible.
Why build an alternative menu rather than fix the original menu?
Inaccessible menus can be fixed at the source code level. However, a redesign for large and complex enterprise websites can take months, if not years. Smaller businesses often rely on content management systems to build menus for them and lack developer resources and expertise to make them accessible. For this reason, customers of all sizes choose AudioEye to apply custom fixes to their websites to mitigate accessibility issues efficiently and effectively.