Martin Greaves

Okay, thanks. Yes, I think I’m going to have to do something like that. A shame that Graham’s plugin seems to cause problems with mouse users as that seems the perfect solution. Thanks for your help and advice though, was good to be able to talk to someone about it.

Yes, that’s a good question. While I have developed all of the content, we have a volunteer who is a web programmer by profession who set up the Simone theme and customised the layout for us. Poor guy wasn’t expecting me to then do something like this with regard to the menu structure and it didn’t occur to me that having this style of dropdown menu would cause problems when navigating with a keyboard. So I’m learning as I go along on this.

I am not a web programmer but I am comfortable using WordPress to add content and configure the site and can get by in html but I accept I might be doing something that from a programming perspective is a stupid idea. I wanted to see if there was a solution though that avoided changing the design as I have had very positive feedback from people using screen magnifiers regarding the overall layout and the content. I have one screenreader user who managed to navigate the site in spite of this problem but I have had two that became unstuck trying to find their way through. I am reaching the conclusion though that I will have to make the top menu into linked pages and add some content of some description as much as I don’t want to.

As I understand it, if I add link attributes, these then appear as ‘links’ to the screenreader which confuses the user as they then try to open the pages. I had marked them with hash tags – which also solves the problem in respect of tabbing but screenreaders then announce these items as contatining links, so again you have the problem that a blind user would assume that these should open into pages. Ideally, as per Graham’s solution, I would like them to be skipped over when tabbing so that screenreader users are not confused by these items.

At the moment the website is still in development. You can have a look at the site here: If you try to tab through the page you will find it jumps to the search and social media menu bar without tabbling through the man menu bar.

https://mab.org.uk.gridhosted.co.uk/