Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility/Top priority issues with templates

1. 
2. Collaborations
3. WikiProjects
4. Accessibility

Here is a small list of long awaited key improvements to make, often important for several aspects of web quality.

As major changes in templates are often long and tedious to make (and also to gather consensus on the said changes), we should aim to maximize the value of these changes, and aim for quality in a broad way. Improving care of accessibility, usability, semantics, and front-end web speed altogether when possible. Back-end template performance should also be taken into account when relevant.

Most widely used templates

We should make a list of the 200 most widely used templates and review them carefully, monitor their changes, etc. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility/Most widely used templates.

Table templates

Please help expand this list. To be reviewed

• Category:Military infobox templates

Easy to fix templates

• Mostly done. Template:Increase, Template:Steady and Template:Decrease, now use an icon with alt text. Template:DecreasePositive and Template:IncreaseNegative are fixed too. Contrast could eventually be improved.

Infobox

Without changing the layout nor making big changes:

•  Done Template:Infobox/row - included in more than 782589 articles. With this most of the job is done, Template:Infobox is awesome and must be used
  • "font-size:88%": I will definitely try my hardest to have the default text size in Template:Infobox set back to default. Small font size are hard to read, and thus reduce usability. This was proved by scientific reading studies, small text size can lengthen the reading rate by 1.5 (for example, a text that you could read in 20 seconds in normal size (12 points) could take you 30 seconds in smaller size (10 points). See Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Readability guidelines
•  Done Template:Infobox artist discography - but very lacking from a design point of view

Remaining Infobox that needs to be converted to Template:Infobox

• Template:Infobox ship characteristics
• User:Matthew25187/Infobox tram network, review
• and many more, please help find them.

Templates-based tables

•  Done Template:VG series reviews : most important fix is done, improved with scope="row" and plainrowheaders
•  Done Template:Pinyintable, done
•  Done Template:US DemogTable, fixed in march 2011
• Template:Infobox US university ranking, was fixed in 2010, but since it was massively deteriorated in 2011.

Citation templates

• Template:Quote box: should use the blockquote tag. DIVs within the textual content should be replaced by SPANs (the enclosing paragraph P can then be generated correctly by MediaWiki).

Harder to fix

• Template:Infobox country
• Template:Infobox settlement

Template-based tables

• {{VGtitle}}
• {{MedalTop}}
• Template:VG requirements
• Template:Video game reviews
• Template:Video game titles
• {{AchievementTable}}
• Template:PersonalRecords, {{PersonalRecordsTop}} and {{PersonalRecordsSport}} partially fixed
• Template:Infobox weather
• Template:MIinttop (see M-28 (Michigan highway))
• Template:Jctint and all subordinate templates such as Template:CAint. These only mark the mile column cells as row headings. The state, county, and location columns would best be rendered as rowgroup headings and individual cells would best render with the header attribute added. This would best be accomplished at the code level without requiring re-editing of pages using that template.
• Template:Year3
• Emiel Puttemans and the like
• {{Fieldhockeybox}}
• Template:Largest cities of Italy
• List of accolades received by Precious
• Template:Track listing, inline colors (use CSS instead for customization and optimization), needs structure improvements

Others

• Template:Image label
• Template:Bar box
• Template:Bigbold
• Template:Cladogram
• Template:Cquote

Timelines

Replacement by tables

• Template:Georgia, Largest cities, 2009 Census -- Bar Graph, March 2011

Notes:

• Template:Bar graph has potential to be widely used, and replace several timelines;
• The method used at the French template Modèle:Pyramide des âges may prove to be useful.

Headers templates

• Template:Documentation/preload, fixed in march 2011

Templates that can easily be misused

Usage of these templates should be checked on a regular basis.

• Category:Hidden text templates
• Category:Text color templates

Cross-wiki ban of HiddenStructure

See Wikipedia:HiddenStructure. The hiddenstructure class was removed from skins in bugzilla:17009. It may remain in several wikis' local common.css.

• Some uses remain at de.wiki, about 14 templates.
• Problem solved at fr.wiki, since November 2011.

Low priority improvements

Improvements to collapsible menus

Another script should be made from scratch. Wikipedia:WikiProject Accessibility/Navigation menu will serve as the experimental field for this job. The code is almost ready at User:Dodoïste/navmenu.css and User:Dodoïste/navmenu.js.

Accessibility-wise, this new script should allow for menus made of lists, the sub-menu headers being part of the list (which is currently impossible). And the link or button used to show/hide the menu should be able to be inserted inside a li element, along with its corresponding header. Alternatively, the same thing can be done with the p element. Another alternative is to provide a meaningful title to the link show/hide, in order to made it explicit in context. And neither MediaWiki nor the collapsible script allow to fix this issue, in the current implementation of the script. Related WCAG 2 guidelines:

1. H30: Providing link text that describes the purpose of a link for anchor elements and G91: Providing link text that describes the purpose of a link
2. H25: Providing a title using the title element
3. H33: Supplementing link text with the title attribute
4. F63: Failure of Success Criterion 2.4.4 due to providing link context only in content that is not related to the link

Usability-wise it should be done with JQuery to make pretty animations, and CSS for button affordance. It implies that the JQuery library should be deployed to all skins, this is planned by the Usability Initiative team.