UniWiki:Manual of Style/Accessibility: Difference between revisions

A standardized structure of articles improves accessibility, because it enables users to expect contents to be in a specific part of the page. For example, a blind user is searching for disambiguation links. If they don't find any at the top of the page, they will know that there aren't any and they don't have to read the whole page to find that out.

Use the correct wikitable pipe syntax to take advantage of all the features available. See [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Table MetaWiki:Tables] for more information on the special syntax used for tables. Do not solely use formatting, either from CSS or hard-coded styles, to create semantic meaning (e.g., changing background colour).

:''See also: [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Data tables tutorial|Wikipedia:Data tables tutorial]]''

[[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility/Data tables tutorial|Wikipedia's data tables tutorial]] provides detailed requirements about:

In general, styles for tables and other block-level elements should be set using CSS classes, not with inline style attributes. It allows users with very specific needs to change the color schemes in their browser's style sheet. For example, a style sheet at [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Style sheets for visually impaired users|Wikipedia:Style sheets for visually impaired users]] provides higher contrast backgrounds for [[Wikipedia:WP:NAVBOX|navboxes]]. The problem is that when the default site-wide classes are overridden, it makes it far more difficult for an individual to choose his/her own theme.

In general, articles should use [[Wikipedia:Help:Wikitext|Wikimarkup]] in preference to the limited set of [[Wikipedia:Help:HTML in wikitext|allowed HTML elements]]. In particular, do not use the HTML style elements {{tag|i|o}} and {{tag|b|o}} to format text; it is preferable to use Wiki-markup <code><nowiki>''</nowiki></code> or <code><nowiki>'''</nowiki></code> for purely typographic italicisation and boldfacing, respectively, and use [[Wikipedia:Category:Semantic markup templates|semantic markup templates]] or elements for more meaningful differences.  The {{tag|font|o}} element should also be avoided in article text to emphasise logical differences, not just visual ones.. Of course there are natural exceptions; e.g., it may be beneficial to use the {{tag|u}} element to indicate something like an example link that isn't really clickable, but underlining is otherwise generally [[UniWiki:Manual of Style/Text formatting#How not to apply emphasis|not used in article text]].

UniWiki articles should be accessible to readers using browsers and devices that have limited or no support for [[Wikipedia:JavaScript|JavaScript]] or [[Wikipedia:Cascading Style Sheets|Cascading Style Sheets]]; remember that UniWiki content can be reused freely in ways we cannot predict as well as accessed directly via older browsers. At the same time, it is recognized that it is impossible to provide the same quality of appearance to such users without unnecessarily avoiding features that would benefit users with more capable browsers. As such, features that would cause content to be hidden or corrupted when CSS or JavaScript is unavailable must not be used. However, consideration for users without CSS or JavaScript should extend mainly to making sure that their reading experience is ''possible''; it is recognised that it will inevitably be ''inferior''.