Selectmenu at bottom of screen unusable with laptop touchpads (aka how do I get the dropdown to go up but only when it overflow the bottom?)

Selectmenu at bottom of screen unusable with laptop touchpads (aka how do I get the dropdown to go up but only when it overflow the bottom?)

Hello everybody,
I'm currently using jQuery UI as part of a set of tools I'm making for my work.  It's my first time using it, and overall I really like it.  One part of the task is to make a system for other employees here to report issues using a series of dropdowns.  Naturally I use selectmenu.  It's nice.  However, I came across an issue that I have been unable to find a fix for so far: when a selectmenu opens and overflows the bottom of the page, it becomes effectively worthless if I'm on a laptop and don't have access to a scroll wheel of some kind.  This is relevant because the hardware that the employees will have to use this system will be cheap-ass $150 laptops with bad touchpads and no mice.  I currently have one and I've been using it to test, and I can say with 100% certainty that the following issue will happen on these things.

I've found that the easiest way for me to show this is just to use the selectmenu demo: http://jqueryui.com/selectmenu/.  If I open the bottom menu (Select a title), the window gets longer as it resizes to show the options, but, because it doesn't actually reposition the view, all the options are off the bottom of the screen.  If I try to scroll down with the scroll bar or the scroll arrow, the menu closes and the window shrinks back down.  This effectively prevents me from scrolling down to see the options, while the shrinking prevents me from scrolling after the menu closes and re-opening it.  I can use the arrow keys, but I cannot see what I have selected until I make the selection.  Essentially, the dropdown is unusable for me.

What I want for my project is for the menu to open upwards instead when it's at the bottom.  I tried setting collision to flip, but, as far as I can tell, there is no collision because the page lengthens to accommodate the new content.  Is there a way to get the behavior that I want without having to write something hack-y to override some standard behavior?

Thanks,
Ian Small

EDIT: As I wrote this I discovered that I can force a scroll by clicking and dragging down on the menu, basically forcing the browser to highlight the text of the options.  It's clumsy but it technically works, but I'm going to post this anyway in the hopes that there is a better, more elegant solution.