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!

In this post, Blackle Mori shows you a few of the hacks found while trying to push the limits of Cohost’s HTML support. Use these if you dare, lest you too get labelled a CSS criminal.

Custom cursors with CSS are great, but we can take things to the next level with JavaScript. Using JavaScript, we can transition between cursor states, place dynamic text within the cursor, apply complex animations, and apply filters.

Interactive CSS animations with elements ricocheting off each other seem more plausible in 2025. While it’s unnecessary to implement Pong in CSS, the increasing flexibility and power of CSS reinforce Lee's suspicion that one day it will be a

Tips and tricks on utilizing the CSS backdrop-filter property to style user interfaces. You’ll learn how to layer backdrop filters among multiple elements, and integrate them with other CSS graphical effects to create elaborate designs.

Well, it turns out that SVG's built-in animation features were never deprecated as planned. Sure, CSS and JavaScript are more than capable of carrying the load, but it's good to know that SMIL is not dead in the water as previously

Yay, let's jump for text-wrap: pretty landing in Safari Technology Preview! But beware that it's different from how it works in Chromium browsers.

This CSS-Tricks update highlights significant progress in the Almanac, recent podcast appearances, a new CSS counters guide, and the addition of several new authors contributing valuable content.

Most of the time, people showcase Tailwind's @apply feature with one of Tailwind's single-property utilities (which changes a single CSS declaration). When showcased this way, @apply doesn't sound promising at all. So obvio


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

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

EditPlus Chinese cracked version
Small size, syntax highlighting, does not support code prompt function

MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows
This project is in the process of being migrated to osdn.net/projects/mingw, you can continue to follow us there. MinGW: A native Windows port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), freely distributable import libraries and header files for building native Windows applications; includes extensions to the MSVC runtime to support C99 functionality. All MinGW software can run on 64-bit Windows platforms.

SecLists
SecLists is the ultimate security tester's companion. It is a collection of various types of lists that are frequently used during security assessments, all in one place. SecLists helps make security testing more efficient and productive by conveniently providing all the lists a security tester might need. List types include usernames, passwords, URLs, fuzzing payloads, sensitive data patterns, web shells, and more. The tester can simply pull this repository onto a new test machine and he will have access to every type of list he needs.

Notepad++7.3.1
Easy-to-use and free code editor
