Customizer Menus: Accessibility: reordering menu items should have some indication about the item level

[designsimply]

/hat tip @afercia for the original report at ​https://github.com/voldemortensen/menu-customizer/issues/105

Splitting this out from the users test post on Make WordPress Accessible:
​https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/2015/06/12/accessibility-usertest-menu-customizer/

When reordering menu items, there should be an audible indication of their level.

NVDA
When reordering menu items, NVDA announces “menu is now a submenu item” or “menu item moved out of submenu”, which is useful, However, when reviewing the list while reordering, there is no indication at what level any given menu item is currently set to.

Supernova
When using the reorder feature, there is no screen reader feedback to indicate the menus level, perhaps a level indicator can be added after the page title that says something like “top”, “level 1″, “level 2″, etc to show how far down the tree each menu item is. As this is only really to benefit screen reader users, it could be visually hidden using the CSS clip method.

[afercia]

In nav-menus.php they have (at least) some text to indicate they're sub-items. This could be further improved adding a depth indicator.

[afercia]

Changing from "enhancement" to "bug" as agreed with @obenland.

[celloexpressions]

Is the depth useful or would it be better to know what the parent item is? "Sub item under [title]"

[afercia]

Replying to celloexpressions:

Is the depth useful or would it be better to know what the parent item is? "Sub item under [title]"

I'd say no parent info but would be useful to know the actual sub items level.

[valendesigns]

Anymore suggestions/expectations on the output before I get started on a patch?

[afercia]

Just discovered something I was not aware of because, well it's pretty undiscoverable :) In the current nav-menus.php screen, menu items have some infos about the menu item level and parent. It's done with JavaScript as hidden text and also title attribute. I'd remove the title attribute and keep just the hidden text but the question here is: would users expect to find the same kind of information in the Menu Customizer too? See screenshot:

[celloexpressions]

@afercia could you advise on the ideal wording/information provided and where it should be placed (I'm guessing inside the edit menu item button like on the admin screen?)?

[afercia]

@celloexpressions I'd say it should be placed on the focusable elements, i.e. the buttons yeah. Something like what was done in 33151 for the available menu items, hiding redundant text with aria-hidden.
Not sure about the wording. Maybe use the same wording/information used in the admin screen to keep consistency? And then change it in both places if we find something better in future iterations?

[obenland]

No patch and we're a ew days away from beta4, let's iterate on this in a future release.

[celloexpressions]

There is clear direction above on the preferred text and location from the accessibility team. Re-typing as a bug because the experience is broken for some users and is worse in the customizer than in the equivalent wp-admin screen.

The next step is to create a patch. The patch will likely need to edit the customize menu item control's HTML template in addition to the JS methods that handle reordering and changing depth to keep the text updated when items are moved around.