Hello Aryeh,
Thank you for your answers and questions.
The screen readers should allow the user to expand the menus just like sighted users can -- if that can't be done, that's what should be fixed.
It’s not about the screen reader preventing the interaction. The interaction will be the same as for keyboard-only users. The problem is that there is no indication that the element can be interacted with. It is a heading level 5. How can you know, it does something? The small arrow is not visible to blind people.
What can we do? If you use onclick="" JAWS, for example, will indicate that the element is clickable, so the user will either use the space or enter bar or the routing keys of the Braille display to interact with the heading. (Note: The element does not necessarily have the focus but rather a virtual focus within the screen reader’s view of the website. The screen reader then handles the clicking or focussing, so we must somehow tell it that there is interaction possible.) If you have one of the new screen readers supporting WAI-ARIA, you could build a semantically understandable menu (see http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria-practices/#menu).
Also, I'm not sure what the actual benefit would be -- do screen readers treat div soup better than presentational tables?
Divs are not spoken, but sometimes indicated by a blank line. Whenever you read from one cell to another, you usually get information about your position within the table, the reference to the header etc. If you have boxes really displaying data in a tabular way, that’s fine. But it’s not fine to have tables merely for the sake of layout. (That’s one core thing repeated by accessibility experts again and again.) You will get all this positional information which wouldn’t make any sense and slow down your reading. So, yes: div soup is better than table soup. (Screen reader do have some heuristics to detect layout tables and treat them differently, but the results are varying.)
I've never been clear on what's the best thing to do here. […] This is what HTML5 currently recommends […] “or omit the alt attribute altogether, under the assumption that the image is a key part of the content.” […]
Ah, shame on me. I totally forgot about the recommendation. This is useful and we should follow it.
Kind regards, Maria