mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Jinelle Foley-Barnes <jinelleb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jono,

One of the issue is, when you're writing a Behat test there's no easy
way to teach the community/beginner testers the difference between links
and buttons.

And I press "Button name"
And I follow "Link name"

Having a link with a img places over it makes people think they are
pressing a button. So when the test doesn't work/run they wouldn't
understand why. I don't want to have to get them "inspecting element" to
see if it's a link or a button. It's more user friendly if they can tell
immediately.

Another one of the issues we were discussing was  if you consistently
use buttons for just things that change data (e.g. save actions, delete
actions), and links for everything else people can guess if clicking it
will be dangerous or not. If they don't won't make a change yet, they
can click and see if there is more information or whatever. If you start
making some links buttons, then people lose the association and can
never be sure if it's safe to click or not.

See if you can come up with a way we can approach this, more ideas the
better. We've been discussing it for a while but haven't found a "best
practice" yet :)

Cheers,
Jinelle

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1387412

Title:
  Eliminate links-that-look-like-buttons & buttons-that-look-like-links

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Mahara contains quite a few HTML links (<a> tags) that are styled to
  look like buttons. It may also contain some buttons (<input> tags and
  <button> tags) that are styled to look like links.

  These interfere with our ability to write automated tests, and they're
  bad for accessibility. As the Mahara accessibility checklist says:

  "Use buttons and links consistently.
  -  Use a link if you're navigating to a predefined page or section (navigation, tabs, etc.)
  -  Use a button if you're changing information or state (submitting a form, editing or deleting content, searching, etc.)"

  From
  https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Accessibility_Checklist#Forms

  To facilitate this, we should write a PHP function (and Dwoo tag) that
  allows you to create a "link button", i.e. a button that, when
  clicked, simply takes you to a specified URL. Then we can
  systematically locate all the links-that-look-like-buttons and replace
  them with actual buttons using this functionality.

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