Dropdown menus (a.k.a. flyout or DHTML menus) are not on my personal list of favourite features to use on a website. Many others seem to like them though, and that’s fine as long as such menus are implemented in an accessible way, which to a large extent means making them keyboard friendly.

Unfortunately, most dropdown menus I come across in the wild are not keyboard friendly. A couple of common examples:

• No real links: Sub-level links cannot be revealed without using a mouse, and top-level items are not linked to sub-pages. Not revealing the sub-menus for non-mouse users may be ok if the top-level items are actual links to pages that contain the sub-level links in a normal, visible sub-menu. That way the dropdown menus do not prevent people from navigating the site and can be seen as an enhancement for users who like them.
• Tabbing black hole: Sub-level links are not displayed on focus but exist in the tab order, which makes them technically accessible but also creates a "tabbing black hole" for non-mouse users. Since there is no visual feedback unless you use a mouse they are extremely difficult to use.

Next time you implement a dropdown menu, please make sure to avoid these problems.

Further reading on this subject:

• Martin Kliehm: Accessible Drop-Down Menus
• John Faulds: Dropdown low down

by Jeff Howard

Dear Santa, I've worked hard this year, I served my clients with dedication, and provided value to every organization I've touched. However, I still need better tools to help justify SEO practices. Please have your best elf programmer develop this hack so the value behind SEO becomes more transparent in 2010.

All this year I've been striving for better rankings, as my rankings climb I see more visitors, and it's rewarding. But, I want to know my keyword performance for each organic position. For example, when xxx keyword was at position xxx how many times did someone land on my website.

I've seen others try to develop a hack that helps with this, but it doesn't do the job well.

Build me a tool that helps fill this chart.

by Manoj Jasra

Last week I caught up with Stephen Woessner, the author of The Small Business Owner's Handbook to Search Engine Optimization.  In his book, Stephen outlines a 15-step process to help improve the performance of your website in organic search.  In our chat, Stephen gave me some insight into his latest SEO book.

[Manoj]: Your book is targeted at Small Businesses, talk to us about the importance of small businesses understanding the foundations of SEO in order to really kickstart their website(s)?
 
[Stephen Woessner]: A small business owner needs to take advantage of every possible competitive advantage, especially during this challenging economy -- and having an effective Web presence is one of the best strategies to increase sales. SEO is a proven, low-cost strategy for increasing Web site traffic, and a business owner does not need technical skills to get substantial results. By following the 15-step process in The Small Business Owner's Handbook to SEO, business owners will see a dramatic increase in rankings within 30 days or less and a doubling of Web site traffic in 90 days or less. SEO provides any business owner with measurable results and proven performance.
 
[Manoj]: If small businesses could focus on just 2 or 3 main strategies in your 15 step process what would you want those to be?
 
[Stephen Woessner]: Great question! My advice would be to focus on Steps 3-6 initially. Step 3 teaches business owners how to select keywords that are proven performers so no time is wasted on words that don't matter. Step 4-6 teaches business owners about the three most valuable pieces of real estate on any content page: 1) Page title, 2) META keywords, and 3) META description and how to optimize these fields using the keywords selected during Step 3. However, the power of my 15-step SEO process is using all the steps in unison, but if a business owner did nothing else, they should absolutely take advantage of Steps 3-6.
 
[Manoj]: This book has a lot of great information and can be digested in very little time - is this what you envisioned before you started writing?
 
[Stephen Woessner]: I am glad you think so and absolutely! My goal in writing The Small Business Owner's Handbook to SEO was to make it very practical and tactical. I wanted to include a specific step-by-step process that any business owner could sit down, read, and begin using right away. I wanted to take a no-nonsense approach and provide a handbook that delivered efficient and effective results.
 
[Manoj]: Do you think SEO still provides one of the best ROIs compared to other online strategies?
 
[Stephen Woessner]: Definitely! I cannot think of another online promotional strategy that is as effective as SEO with a little to no-cost investment. SEO should be the promotional foundation to any Web site.
 
[Manoj]: You mention article submissions in your link building chapter, how effective is this strategy?
 
[Stephen Woessner]: Writing and submitting articles to the free distribution sites that I highlight in my book is the single most effective strategy for building high-quality, in-bound links to a Web site. The articles also demonstrate a business owner's expertise in their given industry. The link building strategy I explain in detail within Step 15 will generate hundreds of new, high-quality, in-bound links within 90 days or less. The additional links will also increase a Web site's site popularity within Google, and as a result, the site's rankings will go even higher.

Screen readers have some quirks and odd behaviours, and one that is quite hard to understand is how JAWS determines whether a table is a layout or data table. From Jared Smith’s JAWS ate my tables:

However, JAWS does not consider table headers or any other markup commonly used in data tables to determine the table type.

Instead, JAWS assumes the presence of a data table if it has at least 2 rows and 2 columns AND at least 4 cells in the table are between 200 and 16000 square pixels in size.

Say what? Like Jared says, the presence of a th element makes it virtually guaranteed that the table is a data table. Likewise if the table has a caption element or contains scope or headers attributes.

Sure, there will always be exceptions to the rule, but I have seen very, very few instances of those elements and attributes being used in a layout table.