- 🇺🇸United States flashwebcenter Austin TX
The solo theme now comes with the options hover or click on the menus.
Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.
I continue to explore the possibilities of this great theme.
One issue that's always coming back and concerns any website is multi-level menu usability on touch screens.
The issue is how to make the sub-items visible on touch screens, since the user has no mouse, so we can't use mouseover or hover to show the submenu.
I have been doing some research and it's nowadays not even possible to reliably detect a touch screen device, so displaying a different menu to touch screens is not a good solution to solve the problem.
Screen size might be a way ** at the moment ** to differentiate between PC and tablets, but a surface pro has 1368 pixels width when held sideways. I totally expect full HD tablets to come soon.
To ensure usability on touch devices, one solution is to not put a link on menu items that contain sub-items. So to show submenus, the user taps on the menu item, and this then shows the submenu.
The drawbacks are that this method makes the website look underwhelming on computers and also makes for awkward page structures. Imagine you have a structure like:
all manufacturers
manufacturer 1
man1 product1
man1 product 2
manufacturer 2
man product 1
man product 2
etc.
this looks natural with mouseover
but on a touch device friendly menu, this would look like
all manufacturers (no link)
list of manufacturers
manufacturer 1 (no link)
description of man 1
man 1 product 1
man 1 product 2
manufacturer 2 (no link)
description of man 2
man 2 product 1
man 2 product 2
so in that menu structure, the pages holding information about all manufacturers are on the same logical level as the manufacturer pages, and a page with information about a manufacturer would be one same level as its products.
it's awkward.
it also makes for awkward menu item titles, many of which will be a somewhat redundant.
page designers and clients might complain about the interface's clumsiness on PC.
I have been exploring an alternative way of accommodating touchscreen devices, according to the W3C's accessibility recommendation:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/menus/flyout/
"approach 2: using a button as toggle"
I have tried to implement that button. See the screenshots below.
I'm not posting this as a feature request, but rather to share the visual results of my exploration and to discuss whether this is a good practice or not.
I'm not really certain touchscreen users will instinctively guess that by putting their finger on the chevron they will open the submenu and by tapping the text they will visit a page that is a meta-level above the submenu items.
Another issue is the required size for such buttons to be reliably hit by users.
Thank you for reading
Fixed
2.0
Miscellaneous
Not all content is available!
It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.
The solo theme now comes with the options hover or click on the menus.
Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.