Background
Landmark regions are an important way people using assistive tech browse webpages. Currently most wiki pages easily have 10+ navigation regions depending on the page and wiki. These nav regions aren't always well labeled or easily understood (i.e. "Navigation navigation"), and having too many nav regions can make it harder for users to access other landmarks (i.e the main landmark region). Because landmarks are tied to Vector's implementation of Menu components, there are also examples of landmarks that contain a single element.
Suggested behavior
Many of these landmarks can be combined or removed. I suggest creating 3 new regions roughly corresponding to personal tools in the top right, the main site navigation links in the sidebar, and article links.
Developer notes
This can be accomplished by removing the nav element from the Menu mustache template. While we could easily swap out the nav element with a div, this means that we would lose labeling for the default and tab menus. This should be acceptable considering those menus will be enclosed by new nav landmark regions that presumably would have better labels.
Removing the nav element from the Menu temple also means we can remove the aria-hidden attribute from the label, which was previously used to reduce the verbosity of checkbox hack dropdown menus (the label was read out 3 times, once for the nav label, once for the checkbox button, and once for the label itself).
This change will likely involve cached HTML changes
Acceptance criteria / QA
- Make sure click tracking continues to work on all menu items
- Make sure navigation landmarks are reduced/replaced
- Make sure menus/dropdown menus are still accessible and appropriately labeled for screen readers
