Menubar role

[ecyrb]

From ARIA Authoring Practices Guide: Menu and Menubar Pattern:

A menu that is visually persistent is a menubar.

So, would the visually persistent menus in the Shoelace docs count as menubars? (and have the corresponding role?) And then should (in a perfect world) this next comment apply?

If a menubar is vertically oriented, it has aria-orientation set to vertical. The default value of aria-orientation for a menubar is horizontal.

Would having the role attribute of <sl-menu> be customizable menubar be an option?

Would <sl-menu> supporting an orientation tag be an option?

I'm really not sure how to proceed, so opening in the hopes of discussion, etc. I'm thinking about supporting keyboard navigation as per the APG, hence the questions.

[claviska]

Which "menus" are you referring to? The list of links on the left sidebar is a nav, so we don't want to consider that a menu.

On second read, I think you might be referring to the examples of <sl-menu> and <sl-menu-item>. While they are persistent in the examples, they're designed to function as system menus. From the docs:

Menus are intended for system menus (dropdown menus, select menus, context menus, etc.). They should not be mistaken for navigation menus which serve a different purpose and have a different semantic meaning. If you’re building navigation, use <nav> and <a> elements instead.

I can't think of any use cases where these menus would be static/persistent, though. 🤔

Anyways, menus currently use the menu and menuitem roles. They weren't designed to be persistent, so I don't think menubar is the right role in this case.