Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Hi all
Today I got a review of Vector's accessibility from an employee of the German Central Library for the Blind (Deutsche Zentralbücherei für Blinde, DZB). This is by no means a full evaluation, just the result of having a casual look. I visited them with Till and Maria of Wikimedia Germany a week ago, and Sebastian Brückner kindly agreed to take a peek.
Thanks to all.
- hidden (collapsed) menus use display:none. This makes them inaccessible to
screen readers, etc. Alternative ways for hiding them might be better - such as setting the hight to 0. Has this been tried?
Also, would it be possible to detect at least the most popular screen reader plugins with JS, so a special mode could be triggered for the visually impaired?
Maria added:
It is correct that hidden menus are display:none. The menu can be expanded, but this is not clear to the screen reader user as he wouldn’t suspect
he can
activate a heading. (If the heading would have an onclick event this would be indicated by the screen reader.) This problem can only be solved satisfactorily by using WAI-ARIA.
That looks like a bug. CollapsibleNav is using mousedown and keypress events instead of onclick.
- Tables are used for layout a lot. This is mostly true for content, especially
for Infoboxes, Navigation boxes, etc. This is quite bad for screen readers. It's going to be very hard though to get wiki editors to use proper css based code for table layouts.
Perhaps it would be possible to make {|...|} generate a div-based layout using some magic word or option? This would be so easy with a real parser :) But doTableStuff() looks fairly sane, so perhaps it could be done.
We also have real tables use cases, but it may be worth to try something like this.
- Image thumbnails have an empty alt attribute. This seems like a bug to me -
was it always like this? I suggest to use the image's file name in the alt-attribute of the img tag, and also as the title of the link that wraps the thumbnail. After all, the target of that link is indeed the description of the image file. Could we just implement this, or are there any problems I didn't think of?
Those should have a title attribute. We used to have alt attribute equal to the title, but that was removed for duplicating it and being in fact ignored. Is some screen reader preferring alt over title? See r41837.