User talk:RexxS/Accessibility

This is a pretty compelling demonstration of the accessibility issue that rowspans present to a portion of our readership. This is not just limited to users with a vision impairment. The "user agents" used to access our content are not always the usual browsers we know; they're not even all used by people. Googlebot is a user agent and, while a 'smart' cookie, it and other such data mining systems will be better served by tables that have a semantic structure.

Somewhere in our core goals, it says we're building this content for all people, everywhere. A fair number of people in the world have a vision disability and we have an ethical responsibility to make reasonable efforts to remove impediments to their being able to make sense of our content. Much effort is spent in the real world to help people with disabilities; eye glasses, handicapped parking spaces... It is often a matter of law that reasonable efforts at accommodation be made. Wikipedia can, and should do better in this regard.

We have an enormous number of pages with some form of this issue. I'd not be surprised to find that it's one in ten of our pages. Most editors have little understanding of such issues and I have no doubt that most of these instances were created with good intentions. Addressing this will be primarily a matter of bringing this issue to a wider audience. No one can fix this except an educated community. Sincerely, Jack Merridew 04:56, 31 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that this is a very effective demonstration of a problem many people are probably unaware of. I think it goes hand-in-hand with other Wikipedia features such as alt.text that prove that the project is thinking ahead of ways to become as accessible to as many people as possible. There shouldn't be any disagreement that this aim is imperative. I am certain that most editors would not intentionally add something that would limit accessibility for other users, and as you say, an educated community can address this when it is presented to a wider audience. Rossrs (talk) 09:26, 31 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Would there be any value in also using the same example without rowspans to further demonstrate would it should sound like? Rossrs (talk) 08:25, 1 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Row span does however make it easier for people with good vision to interpret the content of a table. There must be a way to make this work well for everyone. I do not think it is a good idea to decrease a large group of peoples ability to interpret something to make it easier for a small group of people to interpret something.

This should be a problem that is address by the creators of reading programs. This programs can and should be developed to deal with this syntax.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:11, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, old discussion....@Doc James: I agree with you. Accessibility software is already in place, that makes it outside the scope of wikipedia. Wikipedia shouldn't compensate for bugs in third-party rendering software. It's up to the users to find good rendering software that can read rowspan data properly. As it is, the data is there, as shown when one clicks on a sort link in the header. Rowspan is used in the HTML "td" tag, which WMF doesn't maintain. Third-party software should conform to HTML standards, and rowspan is 20 years old to HTML (older than Wikipedia). Xaxafrad (talk) 05:27, 6 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Review of linearized layout table[edit]

RexxS, I made a linearization of the 87th Academy Awards awards table. Would you be so kind as to take a listen and see whether it is acceptable for you? Thisisnotatest (talk) 09:35, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]