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central-auth ALT message for browsers with images disabled
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Description

Please do not say the untrue

Logging you in to Wikimedia's other projects:
.wikipedia.orgmeta.wikimedia.org.wiktionary.org.wikibooks.org.wikiquote.org.wikisource.org.wikinews.org.wikiversity.org
.mediawiki.org

to browsers with images not turned on. Say instead that one needs
images turned on to login to (that mess all glued together here in
the emacs-w3m browser).

See the above URL and its followups, which
apparently petered out and were forgotten.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
URL: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/38673

Details

Reference
bz14597

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 10:14 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz14597.

You should do something like
<IMG="site1.png" ALT="You are seeing this probably because you do not have
images enabled in your browser, which means your browser probably did
not get the cookies to enable simultaneous logins to: site1">
<IMG="site2.png" ALT="site2">
<IMG="site3.png" ALT="site3">
...

Note the newlines after each tag. That will prevent this from becoming
one big ugly line, and also should look fine when one has images
enabled, folding nicely. Or at least use spaces (0x20) if not newlines.

Bryan.TongMinh wrote:

Note: New lines are folded to spaces unless it is inside a <pre> element or has the css property set to preserve whitespace.

Domain changed: "MediaWiki/User login/Settings" -> "MediaWiki extensions/CentralAuth"

Today I borrowed a friends terminal.
I proceeded to login to en.wikipedia.org. All went well and I saw the string of messages that I had been logged in to the many other sites.

I then proceeded to fill out a potentially very contentious deletion request on commons.*.

Luckily I pressed Preview instead of Save, whereupon I noticed my signature was still just an IP address...!

You see, somebody had unchecked "load images automatically" in his browser.

So all along I was fooled by the WRONG ALT messages... I had not been logged in elsewhere one single bit,
(and almost ended up having to retype in all the text after logging in again, had I not used cut and paste.)

Go ahead, uncheck the "load images automatically" box at the public terminal racks at next wiki conference and watch all the confusion you create.

The right message should be
"if you see this you are *NOT* also logged in to A B C D E ...., you need to enable images in your browser!!"

How exactly to do the ALTs is up to you, just be sure the user sees "*NOT*" and also "[what to do about the problem]".

"Keywords: accessibility" is not really right. I'm mainly saying that you are driving normal users who just happen to have one browser setting unchecked nuts. Yes, most should have it checked.

Yes, visually impaired uses will probably suffer to as one assumes they don't have images loaded as it would be a waste. But still they are not the sole sufferers of this bug.

Created attachment 5965
Add descriptive alt message

Not familiar with CentralAuth, so submitting a patch here for review. Message might need some tweaking though.

Attached:

Created attachment 5972
Screen shot of a test wiki showing this alt text

Attached:

hmm.png (235×881 px, 40 KB)

sumanah wrote:

Victor, could you take a look at this? Thanks.

The problem is that the alt text is also used for screenreaders of course. So a login page with in the alt "You are seeing this probably because you do not have images enabled in your browser, which means your browser probably did not get the cookies to enable simultaneous logins to: site1" is also a bit problematic.

We can close this as centralauth no longer uses images for this.

MarcoAurelio raised the priority of this task from Low to High.May 5 2015, 6:15 PM
MarcoAurelio moved this task from Backlog to Done on the MediaWiki-extensions-CentralAuth board.