In my opinion, in XWiki standard we should not force the use of table headers (it could break old content and make it more difficult). However a good compromise would be to display a warning on the editor for tables that do not have a header. This way, when creating the table, the user would make a conscious choice to ignore accessibility recommendation if they do not put headers. Even so, it seems to me like an editor option that not everyone might want in their XWiki.
I think the best solution to improve the situation without creating too much friction is:
Create an administration setting for the ckeditor editor to toggle table header accessibility warning.
Have this parameter set to ON by default.
Display the warning in a box next to the Headers field of the table properties if the current selected value is None. The default is still None.
The advantage of this is that it sheds light on the semantic importance of those headers while minimizing the friction with admins and users: an admin that wants to ignore this feature can deactivate it in a couple clicks, and a user can just create a table without headers without anything stopping them.
What do you think of my idea to solve this issue?
Can you think of an alternative compromise to reduce the number of headerless tables while not decreasing the average content creator experience?
Thank you in advance for your participation in the brainstorming!
Lucas C.
Thanks so much for exploring how to encourage good accessibility practices for table creation.
My one hesitation would be the point that the warning for admin requires several clicks to deactivate. This might get annoying for admin users. I tend to prefer less clicks where possible.
Instead, could there be a hint/guidance text added to the Table Properties box beside the Header that says something like “Assign header rows or columns to improve the accessibility of your table…”.
Thanks again! Looking forward to hearing others’ feedback
Agreed with the premise, but I would make the default headers on, and then let the user switch them off if desired, with the proposed accompanying message. This way we don’t force anything, but we incentivize its use.
I agree with @tkrieck that headers should be on by default. And I agree with @jgilmore that we could show an info / hint in the table properties (could be only when headers are off), without any configuration to hide it.
I agree with @tkrieck that headers should be on by default too. And I agree with @jgilmore that we could show an info / hint in the table properties when headers are off without any configuration to hide it.
Just to be clear, this thread is ONLY about the WYSIWYG user experience, right? (this is not clear from the title of the thread and from the referenced issue title either - the issue title mentions a macro but I don’t think it exists…).
More precisely, we’re not talking about forcing the usage of table headers when using the wiki editor for example, right?
+1 for modifying the WYSIWYG table dialog to have headings by default.
I’m not sure how we’d even force/propose anything in the wiki editor, but we definitely don’t want to force anything on the user. My opinion is that at most we should make it a default, and keep headerless tables a possibility, at least for the sake of backwards’ compatibility.
