Page MenuHomePhabricator

Change tablecell style menu to take into account scope attribute
Open, LowPublic

Description

We currently have the choice of either a content cell or a header cell

Screen Shot 2017-06-30 at 10.54.42.png (284×438 px, 25 KB)

For accessibility purposes we however often apply scope attributes to make it clear to accessibility systems what the intended direction of the header is. I propose to expand the current menu into:

Content cell
Header cell
Column header cell
Row header cell

And to apply the scope attribute at the same time.

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript
Deskana moved this task from To Triage to Freezer on the VisualEditor board.
Esanders added subscribers: Whatamidoing-WMF, RexxS.
Esanders added a subscriber: Esanders.

Just a quick note about the downside here: This markup, although officially recommended at enwiki, is almost never used at any wiki, even in Featured Articles (where it is nominally required). When this is implemented, I think we can reasonably expect experienced editors to be surprised, and therefore to complain about the visual mode adding "unnecessary" markup and creating dirty diffs every time a table is touched.

We should implement it anyway.

The choice of cells for markup for row headers and row scope is rather more problematical. Priority should be on adding scope for column headers as that should be easily achievable and much less likely to encounter opposition.

The other really significant addition would be for VisualEditor to encourage editors to add a caption by setting the default property to 'on', but whether that should be considered in this thread or separately is debatable.