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Gorillas’ nav: a case study

• A really interesting article by developer & accessibility advocate Kitty Giraudel, explaining how they built the main navigation on their employer’s website, Gorillas.
• It’s a hamburger menu style across all screen sizes, not just on mobile. You have to tap on the ‘hamburger’ to expand the menu and show the menu items.
• This behaviour comes for free with the <details>/<summary> HTML elements, which as native elements, work without JavaScript. However, clicking outside of the menu should cause the menu to ‘close’ again, and that doesn’t happen with those elements, so Kitty & the team replace the elements with a <button> if JavaScript is available, adding a listener to the click and focusin events to close the menu if the event takes place outside of the menu container.
• “Landmarks such as <nav> can be listed by assistive technologies, [therefore] it’s important that the <nav> itself is not the element whose visibility is being toggled. Otherwise, it’s undiscoverable when hidden”. So Kitty’s implementation wraps the menu in a <nav role="navigation"> and the CSS visibility toggling is only applied to its contents, not to the <nav> element itself.
• Kitty walks through a good example of progressive enhancement in CSS, using the @supports query to check if backdrop-filter is supported before overriding the background-color.
• Elsewhere on the Gorillas page, there is a language selector. Kitty points out that they avoided using flags to denote language, as flags are ultimately for countries, not languages (think UK vs USA flags for English).
• The language selector uses 2-letter codes, e.g. “EN” for “English”, with visually hidden text to clarify the language name: <a href="/en" hreflang="en">EN<span class="sr-only" lang="en"> — English</span></a>. Note the hreflang attribute, which I hadn’t heard of before, but is supposed to indicate the language of the page that is being linked to. Kitty admits it “might do nothing”, given the lack of documentation on it.
• They initially tried applying an aria-hidden to the 2-letter language codes to avoid assistive technologies reading them out (as they’re often incorrect, e.g. “DE” being pronounced “duh”). However, this would fail WCAG SC 2.5.3 Label in name, as voice navigation users should be able to navigate the page by what they see, e.g. “click DE”.
• Finally, I’ve learned that “When using aria-expanded="true", the label should not mention “open” or “close” (or similar) as the state is already conveyed via the attribute”.

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