Drop Down Menus and the Visually Impaired

[jglasspoole]

My client asked me yesterday whether people who are blind and using screen readers can “see” drop down menus. Does anyone know?

[C. Ankerstjerne]

If the dropdown menu contains text in the markup, then generally yes, however it depends on the type of dropdown menu and screen reader.

[AlexDawson]

As long as the list has been properly marked up there will be no issue... text is great but images will work too for links as long as correct use of the alt attribute is put into action. Remember that screen readers do not care about CSS as the visual appeal of the site really has no importance to the screen reader user (generally). Simply put, if your html is solid, no matter what you want to put on there, it should work fine.

[Dan Schulz]

And yet the screen readers do have issues with some CSS. For example, if you're using the display state to show/hide your dropdown links, many screen readers will actually honor the display: none; state and fail to read those links.

(This is why position: absolute gets used instead.)

[C. Ankerstjerne]

That is easily fixed by using the proper media type for the style sheet, though.

[JamesU2002]

Very hard to get drop down menus perfectly accessible. Doing a search on Google shows exactly what I mean.