Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Infobox accessibility

The technique of creating "extra" lines within an infobox by adding HTML breaks (i.e. ) to matching cells of a single HTML row creates an accessibility problem, primarily for blind users. This page provides a description of the problem and suggestions for how to fix it. A project to find and fix instances of this problem is currently underway.

More than one field per parameter
For example, the template:infobox country and template:infobox city both had a single "leader" row, created from the contents of a pair of parameters one specifying the title and the other specifying the leader's name. For countries/cities with mutliple leaders it was common to overload the single pair of parameters sort of like the following:

| leader_title = President Vice President | leader_name = Tweededum Tweedledee

The result is two "rows" where the parameters are set up to allow only one. The problem is that this ends up generating HTML somewhat like:

President Vice President Tweedeldum Tweedeldee

which is clearly one row. So who cares as long as it looks OK? Well, if you use a screen reader instead of a visual browser, the audible presentation follows the HTML structure, presenting table content top to bottom, row by row, cell by cell. This is not too bad in the President/Vice President case (you hear "President. Vice President - Tweedeldum. Tweedledee." instead of "President - Tweedledum. Vice President - Tweedledee"), but if there are 5 lines of leaders with unfamiliar titles and unfamiliar names it gets significantly difficult to match the title to the name.

The suggested fix is to add a number of (optional) parameters, like

| leader_title1 = President | leader_name1 = Tweedledum | leader_title2 = Vice President | leader_name2 = Tweedledee

so the old parameters leader_title and leader_name are now obsolete. The next step is to update the infobox's documentation (usually in the template's talk page) removing all appearances of leader_tile and leader_name with parameters leader_tile1, leader_name1, leader_tile2, leader_name2, and so on.

The final step is to modify all articles calling the template with the obsolete parameters. But if these parameters are optional maybe not all articles linking to the template will need modification. In this case the template can add those articles to Category:Articles using obsolete parameters to help in this search.

More than one field per row
Sometimes there are enough parameters, but each field doesn't have its own row but some related fields are grouped in the same cell adding HTML breaks. For example:

Water (%) km&sup2;
 * Area

Which looks like this: which is again one row. So if this template is called for example with area=1000</tt> and percent_water=1%</tt> a screen reader will read "Area, Water (%), 1000 km&sup2;, 1%" instead of "Area, 1000 km&sup2;, Water (%), 1%", which is the correct order.

In this case is easier to fix this problem because only the template should be changed, i.e. because no new parameters are added no changes should be made in articles using this template.

You can help!
This fixes have been implemented for fields like these in template:infobox country and template:infobox city. Please see this page's talk page for activities underway to fix other instances of this issue.