Crow's Nest Menu Navigation

Accessibility considerations

It’s important to make clear who this plugin helps, and who it doesn’t. Crow’s Nest is designed to mainly help people who navigate by keyboards on sites that have extensive menus that drop down on hover and focus. Best practice for menu accessibility is to have it drop down by clicking either the primary menu item that has a dropdown, or a drop-down control right next to it. This allows screen reader users, as well as voice-activation users, to navigate the menu.

Screen reader users are able to benefit from Crow’s Nest, but it takes a little bit of effort: they need to disable the virtual cursor in JAWS and NVDA, or the Quick Nav in VoiceOver. It’s not a difficult process, but is an additional step that will need to be taken to navigate the menu most easily. We suggest that you include something similar to the following paragraphs in your accessibility statement to let visitors know how to most efficiently navigate your menu:

“While the menu is fully navigable to screen reader users by using the Tab key, or even arrowing through it, it has a considerable number of items spread across several dropdowns. Screen reader users who disable the virtual cursor (NVDA and JAWS), or disable QuickNav (VoiceOver) are able to use the left and right arrow keys on their keyboard to navigate the primary menu items, and the up and down arrow keys to navigate the submenu items.

To do this, before you navigate into the menu, for JAWS and NVDA, use the keystroke Insert + Z. For VoiceOver, press the left and right arrow keys simultaneously. When navigating the menu, press Enter to go to the selected menu option, or the Escape key at any time to exit into the page. Once out of the menu, make sure to reenable Virtual Cursor by again pressing Insert + Z, or Quick Nav by again pressing the left and right arrow keys simultaneously.”

Another case you should consider with your menu is the user who comes to your site on a large tablet. This may have a large enough screen to display your desktop menu, but if your primary menu items are links in addition to dropdown indicators, there may be no way for touch users to make the menu items drop down, since tapping on the menu item will take them to that link instead. If you remove the link from the primary item itself, tapping on it should give it focus and thus cause the menu to drop down, though you should test your menu extensively to make sure this is the case.

In any event, while Crow’s Nest is not designed to fix every accessibility issue with your menu, it can be helpful for many users. When you are able to undergo a thorough remediation effort on your menu, you should do so. Crow’s Nest may benefit many of your users until then. It may even be beneficial after then if your menu remediation does not enable arrow-key navigation.