Yesterday, I spoke to Amanda Rush, who was instrumental in testing the WordPress theme we’re using on this site. Amanda is one of the best accessibility advocates you will find, and a web developer to boot. When Derek Lane of WDGLFM reported a bug regarding Firefox and NVDA, I decided to contact Amanda to find out whether it is, actually, a bug. In fact, it is not, it is expected behavior, designed to foster keyboard accessibility even when the screen reader being used is not advanced.
When using Firefox and NVDA, and to some extent JAWS, the listen submenu in the navigation menu does not expand. This occurs, in NVDA’s case, when screen layout mode is turned on in the browse mode dialogue. In this event, tabbing through the navigation menu, specifically past the “listen to TBRN” menu item, will expand the submenu. If you turn off screen layout mode in the browse mode dialogue in NVDA, the submenu automatically expands. This note only applies to Firefox and Chrome, it does not apply in Internet Explorer where you have to manually expand menus. A button to do this is included for all menus.
We’d like to thank Amanda for her time…I personally know that this is something she wasn’t expecting to do while waiting for a Cheeseburger. Stay tuned to the New TBRN website for more news about this, and other announcements we will make soon.