UDM Blog – Web Accessibility, Development, Marketing and Trends

Keeping you informed on the lastest web development and accessibility information.

Archive for July, 2011

UDM v4.6 is available!

Monday, July 25th, 2011

This extensive release consolidates support for recent versions of all major web browsers. In addition, it brings a number of bugfixes and extension updates for smoother navigation and better display of menus and tooltips.

Version 4.6 adds/confirms support for the following new browsers:

  • IE8
  • Google Chrome
  • Firefox 3
  • Opera 9/10
  • Safari 3/4/5
  • Konqueror 4

This version also includes the following, unrelated bugfixes:

  • extended full arrow-key navigation to Konqueror 4.0 or later
  • fixed an arrow-position bug in IE7 with right-aligned horizontal navbars
  • fixed the auto-sizing menus extension, so that additional leeway space is not added to first-level menus of a horizontal navbar if they’re sized to match their parent link
  • fixed a bug with the you-are-here extension in all versions of IE so that here-indicated links have the correct arrow-rollover
  • added support for the onfocus tooltips extension to Opera 9 or later, Safari 3 or later, and Google Chrome
  • added support for the sliding menus extension to Konqueror 4

There’s one significant change to the Keyboard navigation module:

  • changed the default keyboard navigation hotkey from F12 to F8 because F12 is used by default by Expose in OSX. The new value works in all browsers that support full keyboard navigation, without any native conflict. Existing implementations can make this change by modifying the 5th value in um.keys (keyboard navigation hotkey) from “123″ to “119″

Ultimate Dropdown Menu 4.5

UDM is a fully-featured and accessible DHTML dropdown menu, that provides useable content to all browsers - including screenreaders, search-engines, text-only browsers and any web enabled device such as PDAs, iPhones ®, and Blackberrys ®. But having a dropdown menu that makes use of the key benefits of accessibility shouldn't mean compromise, and so UDM includes a sophisticated range of design and usability controls, to give you a tool with unique capabilities:

We'll customise for you!

With our in-depth knowledge we can save you time and money in development.

Get a quote today!

Server-Side Frameworks

UDM is available in a range of server-side frameworks, that generate CSS and scripting on the server, and can bring the total filesize to only 20K!

Recent articles

Initialization trigger element
Defining a trigger element allows the menu script to initialize before window.onload!
The implications of initializing before window.onload
Any scripting you do which is tied into the API "Ready" event (event "010") may need to be checked to make sure it still behaves correctly.
Setting the character-match value for allowed filenames
The file path in the PHP configuration can now contain "\" (backslash) and ":" (colon), for greater compatibility with Windows server paths.
Refreshing the tree after dynamic changes
Using the um.refresh method, you can add or remove items after page load, or populate the menus using AJAX.

Popular extensions

"You are here"
Tells you where you are in the navigation tree.
Load XML
Use an XML document as your menu data source.
Scrolling Menus
Adds up/down scrolling behavior to overlong menus.

See all available extensions


Search

UDM 4 is valid XHTML, and in our judgement, meets the criteria for WAI Triple-A conformance.

-