Clicky Menus lets you create a progressively-enhanced, accessible one-level dropdown menu that opens when activated by click, touch, or ENTER/SPACE. The menu is progressively enhanced, supporting hover and keyboard navigation (in modern browsers) if JS is not enabled.

Demo on CodePen

Why should you want menus that work this way? Read the accompanying article on CSS Tricks, "In Praise of the Unambiguous Click Menu".

Features

Supports interaction with mouse, touch, and keyboard
Converts parent menu items from links into buttons
Automatic aria-expanded, aria-controls and aria-hidden support
Close open submenu with ESC key
Close open submenu with click outside of open menu
Basic offscreen-menu prevention
Configure custom submenu selector

Why only one level of submenu?

This script only supports a single level of submenus, i.e., there are no "sub-sub-menus" or "tertiary menus". This is intentional because:

I personally don't like them. They give off a bit of a "navigation smell"—a la "code smell"—and can often be avoided for better results.
This makes it very easy to make "mega menus" that can contain nested lists (basically permanently visible tertiary menus).

If you really want this feature, there's an open issue for sharing use cases. If you want to submit a pull request, please coordinate on that issue before doing any work!

Setup & Configuration

Clicky menus requires one JS file, one CSS file, and a list with the class clicky-menu. Most of the time, Clicky Menus requires no configuration!

Include clicky-menus.js anywhere in the DOM and clicky-menus.css in the <head>.
Put the clicky-menu class on the top-level <ul> element containing your menu

Custom submenu selector

If you have unusual markup or design requirements, you can set a custom selector for the submenu element with a data-clicky-submenu-selector attribute on the top-level <ul> element (the same one with the clicky-menu class).

For example, if you only want to select the first level of nested <ul> elements while building a megamenu, you would do:

<ul class="clicky-menu" data-clicky-submenu-selector=".clicky-menu > li > ul">
    <!-- menu items -->
</ul>

Closing submenus with JS

There are a variety of situations where you might want to force submenus to close based on interactions elsewhere on the page. For example, maybe an adjacent search toggle overlaps with submenus when expanded.

To close all open submenus, dispatch the custom event clickyMenusClose to the .clicky-menu DOM node (usually the <ul> containing menu items).

Example:

<button id="close-open-submenus">Close Open Submenus</button>

// select the menu to manipulate
const myMenu = document.getElementById('my-menu');
// an element that triggers the close event
const closeButton = document.getElementById('close-open-submenus');
// dispatch the custom event when clicking the button
closeButton.addEventListener( 'click', () => { myMenu.dispatchEvent( new Event( 'clickyMenusClose' ) } );

Expected markup and markup transformation

<nav id="primary-nav"> <!-- element must have an ID -->
 <ul class="clicky-menu no-js">
  <li>
   <a href="#" class="a-custom-class">Parent Menu Item 1</a>
   <ul>
    <li><a href="page-1a.html">Submenu Item 1a</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1b.html">Submenu Item 1b</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1c.html">Submenu Item 1c</a></li>
   </ul>
  </li>
  <--! etc… -->
 </ul>
</nav>

Once the script runs, the markup is changed to:

<nav id="primary-nav"> <!-- element must have an ID -->
 <ul class="clicky-menu no-js">
  <li>
   <button aria-expanded="false" aria-controls="parent-menu-item-1-submenu" class="a-custom-class">Parent Menu Item 1</button>
   <ul id="parent-menu-item-1-submenu" aria-hidden="true">
    <li><a href="page-1a.html">Submenu Item 1a</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1b.html">Submenu Item 1b</a></li>
    <li><a href="page-1c.html">Submenu Item 1c</a></li>
   </ul>
  </li>
  <--! etc… -->
 </ul>
</nav>

Notes on markup transformation

All attributes on links converted to buttons are retained except for href.
All elements inside links converted to buttons, such as an SVG icon, are retained in the button.
When a user clicks a submenu toggle button (i.e., parent menu item), aria-expanded and aria-hidden are appropriately toggled between true and false.

Browser Support

All Modern Browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari.

Internet Explorer 11 support is possible if you include polyfills for closest and NodeList.forEach and transpile your code with something like Babel.

Changelog

1.2.0 (May 21, 2024)

You can now close open submenus from 3rd-party JS with the clickyMenusClose event
The default CSS will now correctly position submenus relative to the parent list item

1.1.0 (October 19, 2023)

Add support for data attribute that sets custom submenu selector
Fix mismatched variable name leading to broken submenu IDs
Improve documentation in the readme

1.0.0 (March 15, 2021)

It's alive!

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Package last updated on 21 May 2024

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clicky-menus

Clicky Menus

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