Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-09-10/Technology report

Accessibility
The poll results diagram is inaccessible to many who are colour blind, because it uses colour alone to distinguish between sections (contrary to MOS:COLOUR). The problem can be simply remedied, by adding the relevant figures to the lower, text, part of the diagram.

It also requires an alt attribute, containing all the text in the image. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:25, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm, I wonder why no-one's mentioned this before? Perhaps colour-blind users interested in the poll results simply click through to see the numerical listings on the file description page? - Jarry1250 [Deliberation needed] 11:18, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Or they might just get used to nobody considering their difficulties, lose interest, and move on to another page. While we're on the subject, the poll results are completely opaque to anyone using a screen reader as well. It just needs the Description from the image page to be used as a caption and you'd make it accessible for both colour blind and screenreaders. --RexxS (talk) 00:18, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Are there good policies anywhere on best practices for editing with consideration for readers with disabilities?  Blue Rasberry    (talk)   12:39, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
 * Manual of Style/Accessibility is a reasonable starting point (it's a guideline, of course). --RexxS (talk) 13:15, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

MediaWikiWidgets.org section
I think this "in brief" section could use some rewriting. The "widgets system" is actually the Widgets extension, and it's not used for displaying GUI widgets, but rather, for the most part, for embedding functionality from 3rd-party services like YouTube, Disqus, etc. Also, I don't know where "it garners little but disdain from a significant percentage of mainstream developers" came from - as far as I know, only two volunteer developers said anything bad about that extension on the mailing list discussion; I'm not sure that most core MediaWiki developers are even aware of its existence, let alone have an opinion on it.

The title of the section is spot-on, though. Yaron K. (talk) 12:13, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
 * (I would describe an embedding of an external service like DisQus as a widget? Perhaps the linked article needs generalisation) Yeah, I probably overstretched slightly on the "disdain" point -- the word is a little strong -- although one suspects that a significant proportion of developers used to writing in PHP (say) would be in general unhappy with the implementation of widgets, in the same way that they are unhappy when forced to write in wikitext {{ notation. - Jarry1250 {{sup|[Deliberation needed]}} 20:20, 11 September 2012 (UTC)


 * What do you mean, "probably overstretched slightly"? As far as I can tell, you made a statement based on no evidence. Yaron K. (talk) 20:51, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Skyscraper sidebox
Jarry, is it possible to give more width to the sidebox? You're probably editing on a relatively wide window; at smaller widths, even half of my 27" monitor, the "In August 2012" info is down to three words a line in some cases. There's a column of white space between the bullets and the left-side edge of the main text, below the quote mark and the "In". It's no big deal, but if horizontal width is easily expandable, it might be considered. Tony   (talk)  14:51, 7 April 2013 (UTC)