Improve the visual indication of the active workspace in the Workspaces listing UI

The patch applied successfully and the active workspace indicating as expected.
Adding screenshots for reference.

The other issue has landed, so if I'm reading this right, we can now kick off the bot for this patch, let's see what it does

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Verified the patch #12 and tested it on Drupal version 10.1.x. The patch works fine. Now the active workspace row is highlighted with a strong emphasis on the workspace label, and add an (active) suffix. I have added the before and after screenshots for reference.

Brought this up in the accessibility channel

From @rkoller

well a sighted user gets the success message that the workspace was changed successfully. for one in the upper right corner of the admin toolbar (showing the new active workspace) and within the success message box. in voiceover you got only announced the confirmation step do you want to change the workspace. after pressing cmd option space to click the confirm button you immediately get skip to main content announced. no success message. if i would only rely onto my ears it might be troubeling

Think we need to announce when a workspace is switched or announce the active one one.

Took me a little longer than planned but i've created a few screenrecordings on macos 12.6.1 with safari 16.1 and voiceover to illustrate a few potential problems in the context of indicating which is the active workspace:

1. on one hand i agree with the assessment in [3092553-6] that grey as the highlighting color for the active workspace is sort of unclear. but on the other hand only providing text for labeling the active workspace requires that the user has to read. as sarah horton put it in "a web for everyone":

Use multiple cues: providing more than one cue for orientation helps both visual and verbal thinkers. for example, using an icon with color coding and a strong text label provides three ways to identify a page or a feature (Horton, S. "A Web for everyone". Rosenfeld Media. p93)

In the current state of the patch a user has to skim across the workspace name until (active) is reached there isn't no other visual cue anymore indicating the active workspace aside text.

2. i've recorded four videos on the workspaces list page. two videos, one tabbing through the interface and one ctrl option space clicking through the interface, with the live workspace active and the same two approaches with the stage workspace active.

live(tab - https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2023-03-05/2%20stage%20tab.mp4)
as you can see due to the fact that Live (active)is plain text it is invisible for someone just tabbing through the focusable items. at the same time Live (active) isn't listed in any of the rotor sections either. in combination with point 3 it makes things for someone just tabbing challenging.

live (sequential with ctrl option arrow right - https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2023-03-05/2%20live%20sequential.mp4)
when the user steps through the aural interface sequentially live (Action) is properly announced all good here.

staging (tab - https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2023-03-05/2%20stage%20tab.mp4)
if you tab to switch to live it sounds like live is not active. if you go on tabbing you now hear just stage, meaning the stage workspace is not active and then you get to publish content which might indicate that the stage workspace IS active otherwise it wouldnt be possible to publish content. but for a screenreader user that is potentially confusing.

staging (sequential with ctrl option arrow right - https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2023-03-05/2%20stage%20sequential.mp4)
when you step through the aural interface sequentially it is possible to understand the situation better. but due to the fact that the link element is just wrapped around the term stage, stage and (active) are announced separately. it isnt necessarily clear if they belong together. first stage is announced belonging to row 3 of 3 in column 1 of 3. for active that position isnt directly announced.

the next three points are not directly in the scope of this issue but definitely at least related.

3. in general it is difficult to assess the active workspace with a screenreader if the user is on a page != the workspaces list page. as you can see in the video (https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2023-03-05/3%20admin%20toolbar%20wor...) the page title gives no indication and within the rotor in the links section you have just the term live without any context as illustrated in the devtools inspecting the link element in the end of the video.
it might be an option to add the context via a visually hidden span appending something like active workspace or maybe just workspace? in other sections of the rotor i was unable to find anything workspace related. or would it be also an idea to add an indication of the active workspace somewhere else as well? maybe append a visual hidden span to the page title providing the context there for active workspaces != live?

4. in regards of the announcement of the workspace switch i've recorded the two possible ways. first the switch via the switch to stage button on the workspace list page (https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2023-03-05/4%20workspaces%20list%20s...).

• i've clicked with ctrl option space the switch to stage button.
• i immediately get announced skip to main content.
• i click again ctrl option space as suggested.
• now i get announced activate the. that made me insecure while being in a confirmation step. i've cheated and took a look and saw the text activate the stage workspace was there. i just pressed the tab key once.
• i press ctrl option space again with the confirm button in focus.
• but now instead of a success message that i'Ve successfully switched to the stage workspace i get the announcement that i could directly skip to main content?

*i've stopped the video too early but if i press ctrl option space again and jump to the main content the success message gets into focus but is not getting announced. that way the user doesn't know the switch was a success).

**and on another side note when switching from stage to live the message on the confirmation page ( Switch to the live version of the site) is completely announced. on the confirmation page for switching to the stage workspace only activate the is announced. the italic styling of stage is preventing that the whole sentence is announced at once.

5. i've opened the off canvas dialogue with ctrl option space (https://www.drupal.org/files/issues/2023-03-05/5%20off%20canvas%20switch...).

• at first i notice that there isnt some sort of announcement that the interface was expanded. it is announced instead that there is a webspaces web dialogue. and the announcement is also a little hard to comprehend. i know i am on stage (is that a workspace as well?) then it gets announced that the current workspace is live and that there are other workspaces? but what are the other workspaces? there arent any announced. so i wonder is stage one of the "other" workspaces? and then comes all workspaces. over all packed and hard to digest information if i am only following the announcement and don't peek on the screen.
• to illustrate a visual glitch i've noticed which is unrelated but odd and noteworthy i've pressed ctrl option arrow right now to get the view all workspaces link into focus. as soon as it gets into focus the layout changes? i've pressed ctrl option arrow left to get back to stage and pressed ctrl option space.
• the modal i get to, compared to the situation in point 4, is completely clear and straight forward. i feel in control.
• i press ctrl option space to confirm.
• but then again same situation like in point 4. i get the announcement of skip to main content. the confirmation that the switch was successful is missing.

while writing up a comment to another issue in the workspaces queue i realized one detail that is missing for screenreader users. After a brief search i've rediscovered this one (already forgot it existed and i've already commented on)

One detail that might be considered to be added to the current MR which might help screenreader users tremendously is adding the active workspace to the title tag in the head. Currently the title is:

[h1] | [site name]

that might be change to:

[h1] | [active workspace] workspace | [site name]

so that you get for example when you are on /admin/structure/types when Stage is the active workspace

Content types | Stage workspace | My Drupal site

The title might become a bit verbose and lengthy but that way all the necessary information is frontloaded, LTR from the specific to the more general (the screen reader user is able to jump off at any point). that means first you have the h1 then the active workspace and then finally the site name. and since screenreaders get the page title announced when loading a page the overall context would be provided satisfying WCAG 2.2. SC 2.4.2. (i've added also the tag wcag242)

one addition, also adding SC 1.4.1 (the use of color.) just in the context of the table, color is the only way to distinguish the active workspace from the rest.

We discussed this issue at #3568606: Drupal Usability Meeting 2026-01-30. That issue will have a link to a recording of the meeting. I am adding issue credit for the participants: @pallavi singh3013, @rkoller, @simohell, and @the_g_bomb.

Usability review

We discussed this issue at #3568606: Drupal Usability Meeting 2026-01-30. The recording of the meeting: https://youtu.be/80LmftxqFSk. The attendees at the usability meeting were @pallavi singh3013, @rkoller, @simohell, and @the_g_bomb.

We not really have anything to report yet. We did an initial exploration, me demoing the problem space this issue is about. And the group agreed on revisiting this issue in one of the next meetings to actually discuss potential recommendations.

The only questions that arose during the meeting were what would be the number of workspaces to expect on a site that is heavily using workspaces? Are we talking of 4 to 10 workspaces, dozens of workspaces, or could that number be even higher? And the other question is what is the expected number of levels? In my tests after the meeting I've created 6 levels of child workspaces, and it looked like there is no actual limit to the number of levels.