Discussion:
[Design] WikiFont and accessibility
Derk-Jan Hartman
11 years ago
Permalink
Something that came up yesterday when I was discussing with User:Rexx about the new WikiFont, is how it will influence accessibility, since it is actually a 'character' that will have effects on screenreader software. I have no idea what the effect will be, so if we start using that, I very much encourage that we should go and find out and then document some of the knowledge we gather into it's style and usage recommendations guidelines.

DJ
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Jared Zimmerman
11 years ago
Permalink
I've heard that it will not, cc'ing Shahyar to weigh in, the same issue
came up at the Zurich hackathon and I believe a satisfactory answer was
arrived at that I don't know off the top of my head.



*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation

M +1 415 609 4043 \\ @jaredzimmerman <http://loo.ms/g0>



On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman <
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Brion Vibber
11 years ago
Permalink
The characters themselves are in the Unicode private use range and
shouldn't be read out; but of course any use of them should be associated
with a localized, readable title -- if there's not text alongside the icon
already, there should be a title attribute or other appropriate marker.

We've been fixing this recently in the new iOS app where we found that we
had to fix both the readable strings and the accessibility roles on some of
our widgets.

-- brion


On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 11:29 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman <
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Martijn Hoekstra
11 years ago
Permalink
Post by Brion Vibber
The characters themselves are in the Unicode private use range and
shouldn't be read out; but of course any use of them should be associated
with a localized, readable title -- if there's not text alongside the icon
already, there should be a title attribute or other appropriate marker.
We've been fixing this recently in the new iOS app where we found that we
had to fix both the readable strings and the accessibility roles on some of
our widgets.
-- brion
Would it cause issues on screen-readers if instead of Unicode private use
range, the existing unicode code points were used?

--Martijn
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Derk-Jan Hartman
11 years ago
Permalink
and shouldn't be read out;
Note the usage of shouldn't. Screen readers, browser and operating
systems are notoriously bad at consistently and accurately
implementing some of this stuff..
"Would it cause issues on screen-readers if instead of Unicode private use range, the existing unicode code points were used?"
Yes, that would be very bad, especially if they overlap with a-z.

DJ

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Martijn Hoekstra
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Martijn Hoekstra
11 years ago
Permalink
On Wednesday, August 13, 2014, Derk-Jan Hartman <
Post by Derk-Jan Hartman
and shouldn't be read out;
Note the usage of shouldn't. Screen readers, browser and operating
systems are notoriously bad at consistently and accurately
implementing some of this stuff..
"Would it cause issues on screen-readers if instead of Unicode private
use range, the existing unicode code points were used?"
Yes, that would be very bad, especially if they overlap with a-z.
DJ
I actually meant using the corresponding code points, like using 1f527 for
a spanner icon, etc.
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max
11 years ago
Permalink
As long as we use the following pattern for markup, we should be good
accessibility-wise. The aria-hidden attribute hides the icon glyph from
screen readers.

|<style>
.icon-star:before { content: "★ "; }
</style>

<span><span class="icon-star" aria-hidden="true"></span>Favorite</span>
|



Code from http://filamentgroup.com/lab/bulletproof_icon_fonts.html

best, max
@awesomephant
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Brion Vibber
11 years ago
Permalink
Post by max
As long as we use the following pattern for markup, we should be good
accessibility-wise. The aria-hidden attribute hides the icon glyph from
screen readers.
<style>
.icon-star:before { content: "★ "; }
</style>
<span><span class="icon-star" aria-hidden="true"></span>Favorite</span>
Awesome, that should do the job for HTML usage yeah.

-- brion
Post by max
Code from http://filamentgroup.com/lab/bulletproof_icon_fonts.html
best, max
@awesomephant
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Derk-Jan Hartman
11 years ago
Permalink
That's exactly what I mean, we should make that part of the usage guidelines for the font, just as we have HTML examples in the kss styleguideline for mediawiki.ui. And we should have a similar example for icon-only cases without labels. etc etc.

Otherwise we will have three or four different and inconsistent approaches and it will be maintenance hell (perhaps we should even have factory api's for them, like with vform).

DJ
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S Page
11 years ago
Permalink
Post by max
As long as we use the following pattern for markup, we should be good
accessibility-wise. The aria-hidden attribute hides the icon glyph from
screen readers.
<style>
.icon-star:before { content: "★ "; }
</style>
<span><span class="icon-star" aria-hidden="true"></span>Favorite</span>
Flow action menus (hover or click the [...] in e.g.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Sandbox ) are close to this

<a class="mw-ui-button mw-ui-quiet"
href="/w/index.php?title=Topic:S08b4fijnlkf1n5s&amp;action=edit-title&amp;topic_revId=s08b4fil7q02dtvk"
title="Edit title"
...
<span class="wikiglyph wikiglyph-pencil"></span>
Edit title
</a>

.wikiglyph {
display: inline-block;
font-family: 'WikiFont-Glyphs';
...
}
.wikiglyph-pencil:before {
content: "\e800";
}

No aria-hidden, but Brion said
Post by max
The characters themselves are in the Unicode private use range and
shouldn't be read out;
so do we need aria-hidden or not?

We should capture the recommendation in CSS comments that KSS turns into
the living style guide.

(I think title text that simply duplicates the anchor's text is redundant,
bug 69213).
--
=S Page Features engineer
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Jon Robson
11 years ago
Permalink
Would be great if people could help fill out
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Icon_Standardisation
I'm keen to document all the ways we currently use icons across
MediaWiki and help us come up with a standard approach.
Jon
...
--
Jon Robson
* http://jonrobson.me.uk
* https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson
* @rakugojon
May Tee-Galloway
11 years ago
Permalink
Just to make sure this q is covered:

A "speech bubble" icon can have a few (but very similar)
representations to *screen
readers*. For example:

A "speech bubble" icon next to talk page label means "talk page."
A "speech bubble" icon next to a new talkpage notification means "new
message."

Is there a way this is allowed?

mm
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S Page
11 years ago
Permalink
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 1:59 PM, May Tee-Galloway <mgalloway at wikimedia.org>
A "speech bubble" icon can have a few (but very similar) representations
A "speech bubble" icon next to talk page label means "talk page."
A "speech bubble" icon next to a new talkpage notification means "new
message."
Is there a way this is allowed?
Sure.

If you're using WikiFont for the icon then it isn't "read" by screen
readers, because it's in the Unicode private use range (and/or because
someone adds aria-hidden=true). In your first example the talk page label
may be clear enough; in the second if the nearby text isn't clear you would
add title="new message on talk page" somewhere in the HTML, and possibly
dive into http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/ if you knew what you were doing :)
--
=S Page Features engineer
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Bartosz Dziewoński
11 years ago
Permalink
W dniu wtorek, 12 sierpnia 2014 May Tee-Galloway <mgalloway at wikimedia.org>
A "speech bubble" icon can have a few (but very similar) representations
A "speech bubble" icon next to talk page label means "talk page."
A "speech bubble" icon next to a new talkpage notification means "new
message."
Is there a way this is allowed?
Yes, just use the 'title' attribute on the closest clickable HTML element
(this might be the icons's element itself, or often a surrounding <a> or
<button>). This will also help readers on desktop devices who will be able
to hover over the icon to read the title text to make sure they understood
the icon right.
--
-- Matma Rex
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May Tee-Galloway
11 years ago
Permalink
Thanks you both.

Great to know! I'll make sure we take this into consideration in during
design decisions.

mm


On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 10:23 PM, Bartosz Dziewoński <matma.rex at gmail.com>
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Matthew Flaschen
11 years ago
Permalink
Post by max
Code from http://filamentgroup.com/lab/bulletproof_icon_fonts.html
I haven't looked into this further yet, but this article also discusses
a lot of potential issues with icon fonts that I was not previously
aware of.

They provide a MIT-licensed library
(https://github.com/filamentgroup/a-font-garde) meant to help deal with
this. We should look into these issues, see if they apply to us, and
potentially use their library if appropriate.

Matt Flaschen
Shahyar Ghobadpour
11 years ago
Permalink
I'm chiming in late here, but our icons are in the PUA, and therefore have
nothing to actually "read". aria-hidden is not necessary in this scenario;
it is only needed when you are using unicode characters that can be read by
a screen reader as something (eg. the caret glyph is read as "n-ary logical
and"), but don't want it to because it is ornamental.

I have a test version <https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/155612/> of
something in Flow now, which allows us to just put the text inside the
icon's element as plain text. This gets read fully by screen readers. The
alternative to this would be to use <abbr> as the icon element, which gets
its "title" attribute read by almost every reader.

--Shahyar


On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 3:30 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen at wikimedia.org>
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Matthew Flaschen
11 years ago
Permalink
Post by Shahyar Ghobadpour
I'm chiming in late here, but our icons are in the PUA, and therefore
have nothing to actually "read". aria-hidden is not necessary in this
scenario; it is only needed when you are using unicode characters that
can be read by a screen reader as something (eg. the caret glyph is read
as "n-ary logical and"), but don't want it to because it is ornamental.
One potential issue they discuss for PUA is:

"Using the PUA avoids semantic conflicts, but that still leaves us with
visual ones. For example, some operating system default fonts define
their own characters in the PUA. If any of your icons are mapped to a
character with a default glyph and the font request doesn’t successfully
complete, the default glyph will be shown."

I don't know how real an issue this is (they discuss an apparent
real-world example on iOS). Might there be a noticeable number of
failed font requests on mobile? Are we avoiding the no-go areas of the PUA?

Matt Flaschen
Shahyar Ghobadpour
11 years ago
Permalink
We can avoid the PUA areas that are commonly used for emoji, and start much
higher up the PUA chain. That's the best we can do, and should work for
pretty much everything.

--Shahyar

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 5:35 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen at wikimedia.org>
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May Tee-Galloway
11 years ago
Permalink
What does starting much higher up in the PUA chain means? PUA is PUA right?

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 2:30 PM, Shahyar Ghobadpour <
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Shahyar Ghobadpour
11 years ago
Permalink
The concern is that some core OS fonts (iOS was mentioned specifically) use
the first range of PUA, in this case for emoji. We can just start our
offset way past that.

--Shahyar

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 2:34 PM, May Tee-Galloway <mgalloway at wikimedia.org>
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