The Downloads section on a project page contains links to see the release notes and download release files. Such as if you go to
https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal
you see this:
screen shot of Downloads section on Drupal Core project page

None of the links in this section is Accessible. This should be fixed. Because the Project module plays such an important role on Drupal.org, I really think this is Critical.

See these guidelines:
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#links

The main idea there is that the link text should tell the user where the link goes. You can also use a "title" attribute on the link to help identify and disambiguate it, if you have multiple links on the page that use the same link text but go to different places.

However, the links in Downloads have neither good link text nor title attributes... and really, they're not all that intuitive for users without accessibility issues either:

- The links to the release notes don't tell me they're release notes. I can't tell you how many times I have clicked one of those links thinking it was the download, even though I'm obviously a very experienced user of the Drupal.org site. Those links should tell me I'm downloading the release notes for a particular version.

- The links to the downloads do not tell you which version you are downloading, and they should.

CommentFileSizeAuthor
downloads.png37.46 KBjhodgdon

Comments

mgifford’s picture

mgifford
he/him
Primary language English
commented
Issue tags: -a11y +color contrast

Thanks for highlighting this issue. There are actually color contrast issues too between the green & red background colors & the blue text.

I just pulled out one row to start discussing this further:

          <tr class="odd views-row-first">
                  <td class="views-field views-field-field-release-version"  data-th="Version">
            <a href="https://www.drupal.org/node/2489496"><span class="element-invisible">Release notes for</span> 7.x-2.0-alpha1</a>          </td>
                  <td class="views-field views-field-extension"  data-th="Download">
           <a href="http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/project-7.x-2.0-alpha1.tar.gz"><span class="element-invisible">Download as a </span>tar.gz <span class="filesize">(128.07 KB)</span></a> | <a href="http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/project-7.x-2.0-alpha1.zip"><span class="element-invisible">Download as a </span> zip <span class="filesize">(171.81 KB)</span></a>          </td>
                  <td class="views-field views-field-timestamp"  data-th="Date">
            2015-May-15          </td>
              </tr>

Titles on links are good for some users, but really pretty useless for accessibility. Best approach is to put the full text in describing the link but making it invisible.

We don't have a consistent way to give those hints to users in an Accessible way in d.o just yet.

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

Why do the W3 guidelines I linked to suggest titles on links if they are not useful for accessibility? Although if you read the guidelines carefully they definitely say the link text should be the first thing.

Anyway I think the Downloads section is practically unusable for sighted users too.

mgifford’s picture

mgifford
he/him
Primary language English
commented

There's a lot of issues with the guidelines from the W3C, but they are getting better all the time.

The big problem with the title attribute is that it's been used wrong for too long. In general it doesn't provide meaning to the user. Often if there is a title attribute it just repeats the information in the alt text. Screen readers can be set up to read either alt or title attributes, but JAWS it is very customizable. My understanding is that most screen reader users do not listen to the title attribute.

It's certainly way more obvious & enticing to download a WP plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

I do think it would be good to highlight the stable release from the last supported version of Drupal like this. Why not highlight a stable release from the D7 series now assuming that is what most folks should be downloading right now. Other releases can be at the bottom. I don't think we should be highlighting dev releases as we really don't want folks continuing to lean on these for production sites.