Revision as of 20:55, 15 February 2014

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watchlist "green bullet" (page updated since last edit) feature inaccessible

the following appears in the second paragraph of the introductory text for the Wikipedia Watchlist, immediately preceding the "Mark all pages as visited" button in the document's reading-order:

Pages that have been changed since you last visited them are shown with a green bullet.

problems:

this information is conveyed using a purely visual indicator;

due to the use of CSS to insert the green bullet into the page's visual rendering, there is no "alt" text (of any kind) available for those who cannot process images... this means that there is no programatic binding between the iconic "green bullet" and a textual equivalent for the icon which would enable a blind user's screen reader to say (for example) "changed", whenever the screen reader encounters the code that causes the bullet icon to be visually rendered, thereby making the visual indicator accessible to those who cannot perceive it;

the choice of a color as the sole means of communicating essental information to the user; reliance on a color change to a universally recognized page element (a bullet) rather than the provision of a distinctive icon (or other symbolic convention) to convey the intended information -- that the page's content has been updated since the user's last visit -- to the watchlist user...
1. consider the obvious problem posed to color blind users; a.k.a. users with a "color vision deficiency" to use the current medical/scientific term for the range of conditions traditionally labelled "color-blindness"... the "greeness" of the bullet will not be perceptible to users with monochromacy (also known as "total color blindness"), achromatopsia and red-green color-blindness... additionally, users with tritanopia and tritanomaly experience great difficulty discriminating between blue and green hues and may not, therefore, perceive the "green bullet" as "green"...
this is a clear, obvious and inexcusable violation of the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG);
this is a clear, obvious and inexcusable violation of the Wikipedia Manual of Style by those who construct and vet the templates for Wikipedia:

@@ Line 10: / Line 10: @@
 <li>this information is conveyed using a '''''purely''''' visual indicator;</li>
 <ol style="list-style:upper-latin">
-<li>due to the use of CSS to insert the green bullet into the page's visual rendering, there is no "alt" text (of any kind) available for those who cannot process images...  this means that there is no programatic binding between the iconic "green bullet" and a textual equivalent for the icon which would enable a blind user's [[screen reader]] to say "changed" whenever the screen reader encounters the code that causes the bullet icon to be visually rendered, thereby making the visual indicator accessible to those who cannot perceive it;</li>
+<li>due to the use of CSS to insert the green bullet into the page's visual rendering, there is no "alt" text (of any kind) available for those who cannot process images...  this means that there is no programatic binding between the iconic "green bullet" and a textual equivalent for the icon which would enable a blind user's [[screen reader]] to say (for example) "changed", whenever the screen reader encounters the code that causes the bullet icon to be visually rendered, thereby making the visual indicator accessible to those who cannot perceive it;</li>
 </ol></li>
 <li>the choice of a color as the '''''sole''''' means of communicating essental information to the user; reliance on a color change to a universally recognized page element (a bullet) rather than the provision of a distinctive icon (or other symbolic convention) to convey the intended information -- that the page's content has been updated since the user's last visit -- '''''to''''' the watchlist user...