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Improve accessibility of the search page
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Description

Author: le.korrigan

Description:
Following recommendations by fr:User:Lgd, there would be some improvements which could be done on the search form to improve its accessibility, according to W3C's WCAG norms. It is a particularly important page, and even more for people with special needs. These are:

  • for each field, having a label element with attribute containing the id of the field.
  • if showing a label is not ergonomic, use the title attribute of the field itself to indicate its use.
  • Use title elements to structure the page: h2 for mw-search-numberresults, h2 on the "Advanced search", h2 for the "Sister projects".
  • correct the use of elements fieldset and legend: the legend of fieldset should be "Namespace" in order to complement the labels of the tickboxes.
  • add a "title" attribute on the links which allow selecting how many results per page should be shown to make them more explicit outside of their context, such as title="show 20 results", title="show 50 results", etc.
  • add a title attribute on the links "more" in the "Sister projects" section, to make them more explicit outside of their context.
  • Use ol elements and not ul to list results.

Hope it all makes sense!

Thanks.


Version: 1.14.x
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz16741

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 10:27 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz16741.

Some of these make sense, like the title attributes on nav links for example.

ol would be confusing as it restarts each time you press "next". Not sure about the h2 stuff either.

Check out test.wikipedia for how the search is being tweaked.

Can we get the new search UI rolled out beyond test.wp ($wgUseOldSearchUI = false) ?

I think that it should be possible to have a real advanced search page like in all search engines, to use not enough known features such as prefix:, exact phrase etc. ([[Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2008-11-10/Search_engine]]).

The changes which have been made by rainman and myself have satisfied many of these concerns, but to use the new search UI you must still configure

$wgUseOldSearchUI = false;

This will be changing soon, as these changes will be rolled out to all Wikimedia projects and the old search UI will be deprecated.

New search UI is in trunk, deployed on WMF, etc. I think we can count this as FIXED.

Issues with the new UI need their own bugs :)