I'm normally a Safari user, but I'm currently working through an online course which supposedly has been optimized to work in Google Chrome. Apologies if this is a total no-brainer, but how does one move through items in a dropdown menu after the options have been expanded? A bit of a more in-depth explanation: many of the quizzes for this course are multiple choice, and I'm required to make my selection from a popup menu (the kind Voiceover calls a "menu popup collapsed".) When I click on the menu, I hear Voiceover say "menu popup expanded" along with a bubble sound effect, but I can't seem to navigate through the options with any of the standard keystrokes. The tab and arrow keys do absolutely nothing--no, QuickNav isn't enabled--and I'm literally stuck in the menu until I escape out of it. As mentioned above there's probably something super obvious I'm missing here, but a basic Google search ironically isn't giving me any helpful results.
Comments
up and down arrows
up and down arrows will get you through theese popup buttons.
Tested with Google Drive
I just opened Google Drive in Chrome, moved down to a file, then pressed the A key to open the actions menu. I was able to navigate the menu options with VO+Right Arrow and select an option with VO+Space.
It may or may not work the same for you. For whatever reason, HTML appears to lack standard UI tools, and everyone who designs a website thinks they need to reinvent every single wheel. I'd love to hear from a web developer on this topic.
Are you on sonoma?
I've noticed with the latest update at least, that when I encounter popup menus, the voice over down arrow doesn't read, the down arrow doesn't read anything. I only know the choice I selected if I press enter to leave the menu then you know what you picked. Another thing you can try if it's multiple choice, is to go in and if the choices are A B C and D? Press D, then enter. see if that helps. It's not on Chrome btw, it's also on Edge.
Focus issues with menu items
Hi, in my experience, on some website, Voice Over might have a tough time setting its focus automatically to the list of drop-down or pop-up menu items after pressing on the menu toggle.
One example you may have a try with is the website bard.google.com. The menu toggle next to each conversation, through which you can pin or delete the respective conversation is non-focusable automatically after being pressed.
The trick I use regularly is to turn off the cursor tracking (shortcut VO + Shift + F3) right after pressing on the menu toggle, and then find the list of respective menu items. This list often lies at the end of a region or landmark, such as the current main region, complementary region, or at the very end of the web page. In some instances, it may also lie at the beginning of the current region, or at the beginning of the whole page even. It will depend very largely on the layering decision of a website's developer.
As to why we need to turn the cursor tracking off first, is that on many sites, it will automatically retract, or collapse the list of menu items when it detects that the system cursor, also known as the keyboard cursor is no longer focused on the menu toggle. Doing this will allow us to go to another area of the page and explore or find the list of menu items without having to change the focus.
Hope this helps.
Update/Clarification
Thank you to everyone who shared their tips, I messed around some more and it looks like I'm experiencing exactly what @Siobhan mentioned above. Hitting the up and down arrow keys does technically take me through the various menu items, but Voiceover isn't reading any of them as I go. The workaround, which involves pressing the down arrow key a certain number of times followed by enter to see what was selected, is a royal pain in the fanny, but it's definitely better than nothing. And yes, I'm on Sonoma 14.1.
I'm experiencing the same problem
Hello all
I'm having the same issue and I think it caused by a bugg in chrome's latest update, we should let Google's accessibility team know of this issue so they can fix it ASAP.