TOPIC: Accessibility workgroup

Hi
this is an opened discussion about accessibility and what can be done to make Maximenu CK fully compatible
Every people that are interested can contribute here, testers are welcome

CEd

Greetings to the community. I appreciate the opportunity to ask for suggestions about website accessibility for sight-impaired and blind users.

My oldest and largest website is www.fearringtonfha.org . This site is for the exclusive use of my community's residents and former residents, who number upwards of 2,000.people. Last year, as a volunteer driver helping non-driving people to medical and other appointments, I met a resident who, like his wife, has been blind since birth. His statement was that our website is "useless" because his screen readers can not "see" menus and other on-screen elements.

Recently this person suggested installing software from UserWay.org . This software has been installed on www.fearrington.com , the website for the builder of our community. If you open this site and type Ctrl-U (or click a small icon in the lower-right corner) you will see an accessibility menu. If you play around, you can get it to read the screen and hear what a blind person hears - quite usable for him, he says.

I did install this on my development site dev.fearringtonfha.org and Ctrl-U opens the accessibility menu. Again, you can make it vocalize (say) what it "sees" on the top menu. You can also select "Highlight Links" and see the problem - in MaximenuCK "separator" menu items are not recognized as menu items, and drop-down and fly-out menus that aren't visible unless clicked (or hovered) are not read at all.

I have learned of two other blind people in the community and I wold like very much to provide them access to the content of my website through the UserWay screen reader.

My suggestion, then, is to provide a way to code the very beautiful and rich MaximenuCK is such a way as to make its functionality "visible" to the blind. How might this be done? I did try (using Chrome's debugger) enclosing a MaxiMenuCK separator's text in a do-nothing anchor link:This causes the UserWay software to recognize the separator as a link - but I don't know how to get it to show the drop-down, set to appear on hover.

Anyone have thoughts about this?

Thanks!