Tables on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are often recolored to help fit with a page's theme. Here's an example. However, when doing this, there is currently no recoloring of the small black arrows that indicate how a table is sorted. This may cause many readers to miss them, reducing their usability and creating an accessibility issue particularly for readers with poor eyesight. I would like to see functionality introduced so that these arrows automatically become the same color as the text in their cell. (Alternatively, they could automatically become white when a table's header row has a background with <50% luminosity, or editors could specify a custom color for them as desired.) Previously raised at en-WP VPT.
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Could you elaborate why the recoloring is done in first place?
(For future reference, please use the feature request form (linked from the top of the task creation page) to create feature requests. Thanks.)
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You can use template styles, upload alternative images to commons, and override the images that the table cell provides.
I don't really have an idea on how to automatically change the color of an img resource...
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It's done for various reasons. Sometimes articles on schools do it to theme with the school's colors. Sometimes TV shows do it to help differentiate different seasons. Etc.
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This is something that should be solved by enWP’s editors choosing colours with good colour contrast against those icons, and not by software changes. Your community can require it in its guidelines. According to WCAG 2.0/2.1, minimum colour contrast between icons and the surrounding backgrounds should be at least 3:1, which would be visible (cannot provide a link right now, but can probably find it).
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That's not a viable solution. Currently, the only available arrow color is black, so the only background colors that would sufficiently contrast with it would be light ones. But there are plenty of MediaWiki applications that use darker backgrounds with lighter text, which is a perfectly valid and accessible design choice — except for the current arrows. This task should be taken up to resolve that issue.
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<marquee>Stop allowing custom theming for no good reason would be another option.</marquee> :P
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Yes. Editors should just not use colours that would make the icon disappear. Custom themes like dark mode etc. can invert the icon by themselves, that’s not what this task is about. This task is about the editors using to do the wrong thing for their arbitrary preference. There’s nothing anywhere that says that that table should be in the colours of the university.
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You're welcome to have a purist view of styling on Wikipedia, but until consensus develops otherwise, such styling exists, and even if it were banned on Wikipedia, there are plenty of other MediaWiki projects that use it. Unless we plan to disable the ability to recolor table backgrounds, we should work to make them accessible.
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They are accessible, they are just made inaccessible by the editors. I think this is the case where the communities should decide how to solve this themselves, and not something MediaWiki should support in its entirety. If you’re using custom styling, you are responsible for making it work with everything, MediaWiki shouldn’t be. Much in the same way that if you put a weird banner on all pages that moves across the page in an animation, it’s your obligation to make it work with everything else and not developers’. It’s not a ‘purist view of styling’ to say that this task should be declined.