Last modified: 2014-09-24 00:03:23 UTC
Created attachment 6027 [details] patch Man it was tough, but I finally succeeded in getting <strong> for selected, (and even <em> for new) into MonoBook for the most important items, finally achieving accessibility. [Below is the justification rant that I was going to send, in order to badger someone else into fixing it, before I decided to see if I could fix it myself, which I did, producing the patch, which please apply.] --Begin rant-- Regarding the $prevent_active_tabs in SkinTemplate.php: Well, did you know that for text browser users, this is permanently on. What I'm saying is the current method of indicating which tab is active depends on stylesheet elements. This creates a browser accessibility disadvantage. Haven't you seen a device or browser where CSS is not supported, _intentionally_ by the way? I mean here you even have access keys [c] etc. but fail accessibility 101. Therefore you should use HTML <strong> to show which tab is active. That way you would have an even playing field, accessibility-wise. Turn off stylesheets in your browser to see how some users lose out. Stylesheets are for prettiness. Here you have crossed the boundary and are making information to the user depend on them too! And the there's the concept of "redlinks"... 1) those in the tabs. 2) those in the text. Well, at least in some browsers one can tell that the name it links to says redlink in it. But for the aforementioned active tabs, "only the <strong> will survive" the accessibility test. --End rant-- Anyway, here I have fixed the accessibility for the tabs, actually the "Views" one sees with CSS off. As far as general redlinks in the text, well, we'll leave that for next episode. As far as non MonoBook, I'll leave that to other folks... you might not want to use classes at all, compare bug #18317. Or you might even want to make the selected item unclickable...not linked.
Please provide this for all skins. We do not want the functionality of the skins to deviate.
What do you know, the same patchfile worked on Modern.php # patch Modern.php patchfile patching file Modern.php Hunk #1 succeeded at 112 with fuzz 2 (offset -25 lines). Hunk #2 succeeded at 137 (offset -25 lines). CologneBlue doesn't array content_actions in the first place, so it's already an even playing field, for better or worse. Same for Standard and Nostalgia. Chick, MySkin, Simple all inherit from MonoBook Be very careful that you are sure that the <strong> and <em> I am using here are the best choices for the job. As the <em> will then become the basis for treating all the redlinks in the entire wiki, upon the day we decide that we should go further and do something to distinguish them for those whose browsers can't see red, etc., for not only those links around the edges of the page we are dealing with today, but for all the page content too.
jidanni, sorry, but the MediaWiki codebase has changed enough since you submitted your patch that it no longer applies cleanly to trunk. Would you be interested in updating your patch and including improvements for other skins as well? Thank you.
Comment on attachment 6027 [details] patch Per automated testing http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-November/056340.html patch no longer applies to MediaWiki trunk in Subversion.
Let this be a lesson for me. Bye.
[Bug metadata cleanup, lowering importance.] If we want to do this, it should likely be part of the functionality of BaseTemplate::makeListItem() (to automagically happen in all skins). But to be honest, I'm really not sure if it's a good idea in general.
Honestly, selected tab IS style. Partially functional style like some other things. But style nonetheless. It is not something that has to be present for things to work. And every browser we support supports css. Sorry but ancient text browsers are not browsers we support. Though there might be some aria attributes we may want to apply.