Top Nav mouse-over menus are not accessible

[dajoturner]

Len Burns reported this issue. "The page contains a menu activated by a mouseover, the "Undergraduate," link. This is completely inaccessible to a screen reader user. In fact, without close scrutiny, its existence would go unnoticed. This would also present severe problems for other users of adaptive technology who rely upon the keyboard. One good test strategy for developers is to unplug the mouse and explore a page using only the keyboard. The question is, can the page still be fully utilized, or are parts inaccessible or contain areas where a keyboard user will become trapped."

[jrosczyk]

Good news: I tested on various iOS and android devices and the drop down did work. However once the drop down menu opened it wouldn't close (but definitely not a phase one deal-breaker).
Bad news: Len is correct. The menu isn't accessible through the keyboard (both tab and navigation). Also I found the page confusing on a screen reader (but I find all pages confusing on a screen reader), so refer to Len's comment for this one.
Solutions: To fix this is going to require an html/css/js change, and it was my understanding that the html can't be touched. @knice Thoughts?

[knice]

Originally, I was using display:none to hide the dropdown menus. Using display: none causes screen readers to skip over the drop down links entirely, as if they aren't even there.

I've changed that code so the dropdowns no longer use display:none. That gets us half-way there. The main menu dropdowns are now keyboard accessible.

The next step is to make them visible when they are tabbed to. I think that can be accomplished with jquery, which is loaded by default on every page.

Changing every main navs HTML is not optimal at this point, but if it's absolutely necessary we can consider it.

[dajoturner]

Excellent. I'm going to close this issue, since it's about the keyboard accessibility. I'll open another issue for making them visible, and set that to Could Wait. See #284.

[thomasgardner]

In the UCSC Technology Accessibility and Civil Rights in Higher Education workshop for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (5-21-2015) workshop leader Don Barrett, Assistive Technology Specialist, US Department of Education / Office for Civil Rights mentioned that this is still an issue in both the 1:00 - 3:00 pm and the 3:30 - 5:30 pm sessions.

[knice]

@thomasgardner Are you sure you don't mean #284? Len's issue here was that the links were completely inaccessible from the keyboard. I fixed that issue. Issue #284 covers the other problem, which is that the dropdowns need to be visible when tabbed to.

[thomasgardner]

@knice Yes it is #284. This proves I'm not good at multitasking. I was trying to pay attention to the speaker, search GitHub, etc. and I did not respond to the correct issue. Thanks for checking. I'll make notes in #284.