Building an accessible main menu for a React PWA using React Router presented unexpected challenges. This article details our journey toward creating a keyboard- and mouse-friendly menu, focusing on overcoming common accessibility pitfalls in single-page applications (SPAs).
Our goal was a menu navigable via keyboard and mouse, allowing users to tab through top-level and sub-menu items (revealed on hover/focus), with clear focus indicators.
Initial attempts using CSS visibility
to show/hide sub-menus failed for keyboard users, as focused elements with visibility: hidden
remain invisible. We switched to manipulating the position
property:
.menu-item { position: relative; } .sub-menu { position: absolute; left: -100000px; /* Off-screen positioning */ } .menu-item:hover .sub-menu, .menu-item:focus .sub-menu, .menu-item:focus-within .sub-menu { left: 0; }
This improved keyboard navigation, but introduced a new problem: the menu remained open after selection (click or tab). This was because the selected item retained focus, and SPAs don't trigger a full page reload to clear focus. Additionally, the "Jump to Content" link became inaccessible via keyboard after menu interaction.
Our first attempt to solve this involved using document.activeElement.blur()
within the onClick
handler of React Router's Link
component:
const clearFocus = () => { document.activeElement.blur(); };
While this closed the menu after clicks, it didn't resolve the keyboard navigation issue or maintain the expected "Jump to Content" link behavior.
To address this, we programmatically forced focus to an invisible, non-interactive anchor element placed above the "Jump to Content" link in the DOM:
const App = () => { const focusResetRef = React.useRef(); // ... other code ... return ( <a aria-hidden="true" href="https://www.php.cn/link/7c127e0c66f06e58c7c7310a7c6fa488" ref="{focusResetRef}" tabindex="-1" style="{{" position: top:>Focus Reset</a> <a classname="jump-to-content-a11y-styles" href="https://www.php.cn/link/3292c5c2ca71351a9406a9614e147ad3">Jump To Content</a> <menu onselectmenuitem="{handleResetFocus}"></menu> {/* ... rest of app */} > ); };
This ensured that after menu selection, the next tab stop was the "Jump to Content" link. The aria-hidden
, tabIndex
, and styling ensured the element remained invisible and non-interactive except for programmatic focus.
To further enhance the user experience, particularly for mega menus, we added a clearHover
state and a timeout to immediately clear the hover state after selection, ensuring the menu closes consistently regardless of input method.
Our final implementation uses a React Context for easier management across components. While we lack real-world user data yet, our solution provides a consistent and accessible experience for both keyboard and mouse users in our SPA, mimicking the behavior of a full page reload. We welcome feedback on this approach.
The above is the detailed content of How We Improved the Accessibility of Our Single Page App Menu. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

The fact that anchor positioning eschews HTML source order is so CSS-y because it's another separation of concerns between content and presentation.

Article discusses CSS margin property, specifically "margin: 40px 100px 120px 80px", its application, and effects on webpage layout.

The article discusses CSS border properties, focusing on customization, best practices, and responsiveness. Main argument: border-radius is most effective for responsive designs.

The article discusses CSS background properties, their uses in enhancing website design, and common mistakes to avoid. Key focus is on responsive design using background-size.

Article discusses CSS HSL colors, their use in web design, and advantages over RGB. Main focus is on enhancing design and accessibility through intuitive color manipulation.

The article discusses the use of comments in CSS, detailing single-line and multi-line comment syntaxes. It argues that comments enhance code readability, maintainability, and collaboration, but may impact website performance if not managed properly.

The article discusses CSS Selectors, their types, and usage for styling HTML elements. It compares ID and class selectors and addresses performance issues with complex selectors.

The article discusses CSS priority, focusing on inline styles having the highest specificity. It explains specificity levels, overriding methods, and debugging tools for managing CSS conflicts.


Hot AI Tools

Undresser.AI Undress
AI-powered app for creating realistic nude photos

AI Clothes Remover
Online AI tool for removing clothes from photos.

Undress AI Tool
Undress images for free

Clothoff.io
AI clothes remover

Video Face Swap
Swap faces in any video effortlessly with our completely free AI face swap tool!

Hot Article

Hot Tools

Atom editor mac version download
The most popular open source editor

DVWA
Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA) is a PHP/MySQL web application that is very vulnerable. Its main goals are to be an aid for security professionals to test their skills and tools in a legal environment, to help web developers better understand the process of securing web applications, and to help teachers/students teach/learn in a classroom environment Web application security. The goal of DVWA is to practice some of the most common web vulnerabilities through a simple and straightforward interface, with varying degrees of difficulty. Please note that this software

VSCode Windows 64-bit Download
A free and powerful IDE editor launched by Microsoft

MantisBT
Mantis is an easy-to-deploy web-based defect tracking tool designed to aid in product defect tracking. It requires PHP, MySQL and a web server. Check out our demo and hosting services.

Zend Studio 13.0.1
Powerful PHP integrated development environment
